Worth Mentioning - The Road to the Sky

We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.

A second act twist, a car ride off a cliff, and more.

THELMA & LOUISE (1991)

Until this year, I had only watched the 1991 film Thelma & Louise once in my life – and that was a viewing I have always remembered. I would have only been around eight years old at the time. My family rented Thelma & Louise, which had been both a critical and commercial success that year (and would receive six nominations at the Academy Awards, taking home the gold for Best Original Screenplay), as soon as it reached VHS. We watched it at my maternal parents’ home, and I remember everyone having fun watching its buddy story play out... and then came the ending. An iconic ending in which the titular characters decide to drive off a cliff at the Grand Canyon rather than turn themselves over to the authorities. I didn’t get it at all. My eight-year-old self did not understand their decision. And that’s what stuck with me over the decades: the movie had a downer ending that had baffled me when I was a kid.

Thirty-five years later, I’m still not convinced that was the right ending for the film because, although there are some dark moments here and there along the way, that 129 minute is largely comedic, and I don’t think Thelma and Louise deserved that fate.

The set-up: friends Thelma Dickinson (Geena Davis) and Louise Sawyer (Susan Sarandon) head out on a weekend fishing cabin getaway, and Thelma does so with the intention of “letting her hair down.” Her controlling douchebag of a husband Darryl (Christopher McDonald), who she didn’t even tell she was leaving, is the only man she has ever been with, and she’s tired of living under his thumb. When the pair stops at a roadhouse bar, Thelma spends the evening getting drunk and dancing with a local named Harlan (Timothy Carhart). They go out to the parking lot – and Harlan reveals that he’s the sort of guy who doesn’t take “No” for an answer. Luckily for Thelma, she brought Darryl’s handgun on the trip with her, and Louise uses the gun to get Harlan away from her.

Unfortunately, comments that Harlan makes trigger Louise, who has a traumatic incident in her past, and she shoots the man even though he was unarmed and far enough from them that they were no longer in danger. He’s dead, and they can’t claim self-defense at that distance. So they hit the road, heading for Mexico, and Louise makes a call to her boyfriend Jimmy (Michael Madsen) to ask him to meet her and deliver everything she had in her bank account: $6,700.

Something that gets the girls in trouble repeatedly is the fact that Thelma isn’t very bright. Darryl has been her whole world up to this point, so she hasn’t had a chance to learn much about the world. The character has been described as being “child-like” in behavior and mentality, and that’s accurate. That’s the only way she could have thought it’d be a good idea to leave the armed robber / drifter she hooks up with on the road (Brad Pitt in his breakthrough role) alone in a hotel room with Louise’s life savings. After that loss, they have to turn to robbery to get by, and more crimes follow.

Arkansas State Police Investigator Hal Slocumb (Harvey Keitel) and the FBI are soon on their trail, although Slocumb is a sympathetic guy who understands what’s going on with Thelma and Louise and hopes they’ll give themselves up before they go too far. Clearly, they don’t do that.

Directed by Ridley Scott from the Oscar-winning script by Callie Khouri, Thelma & Louise is an entertaining movie to watch. Davis and Sarandon do great work in the lead roles, and they had an excellent suppoting cast around them. In addition to the actors mentioned, we also get Stephen Tobolowsky as an FBI agent, Jason Beghe of Monkey Shines as a State Trooper, and Marco St. John – who I’ve always known as Sheriff Tucker from Friday the 13th: A New Beginning, giving a hilarious performance as a rude, dimwitted truck driver. It’s a movie I should have watched a time or two more in the last thirty-five years, and I probably won’t wait another thirty-five years before watching it again. But every time I do, I’ll be wondering if maybe Scott and Khouri shouldn’t have let these women ride off into the sunset in Mexico rather than riding off a cliff in the Grand Canyon.

ICE ROAD: VENGEANCE (2025)

The 2021 action film The Ice Road was primarily distributed through the Netflix streaming service, with Amazon’s Prime Video handling the release in the United Kingdom. When the sequel, Ice Road: Vengeance (originally titled Ice Road: Road to the Sky, but clearly they wanted an alternative with more of a punch) came along four years later, Vertical handled distribution. It got some theatrical play and is streaming on Netflix in some territories – but not in Brazil. Which is an issue for my Netflix-loving Brazilian in-laws. The second Ice Road went to Prime Video in Brazil, and while my in-laws do have access to Prime Video, they don’t use it because they find it too difficult to navigate. So, since they had recommended The Ice Road to me, I felt it was my duty to make sure they got to see Ice Road: Vengeance.

Written and directed by Jonathan Hensleigh (who broke through with his script for Die Hard with a Vengeance back in the ‘90s), Ice Road: Vengeance catches up with truck driver Mike McCann (Liam Neeson) as he’s mourning the death of his brother Gurty in the previous film. Gurty noted in his Will that he wanted to be cremated so his ashes could be scattered on Mount Everest. Seeking to honor his wishes, Mike heads to Nepal with his brother’s urn – and arrives just in time to get caught up in a conflict between a family, the Rais, that opposes the construction of a hydroelectric dam that’s backed by a corrupt industrialist named Rudra Yash (Mahesh Jadu) and would wipe out a river that’s very important to the locals.

Mike and his Everest guide Dhani (Fan Bingbing) catch a ride on a bus called the Kiwi Express, with New Zealand tourist bus driver Spike (Geoff Morrell) at the wheel. They head down (or up) the mountain pass known as the Road to the Sky – but one of the passengers is Vijay Rai (Saksham Sharma), so their ride is disrupted by the arrival of mercenaries who hijack the bus and attempt to kidnap Vijay. Mike and Dhani, who has a military background and proves to be a very capable impromptu heroine, fight off the mercenaries. 

There’s about 89 minutes of movie left from the moment the mercenaries get on the bus, and the entire remaining stretch of the film is a series of action and suspense sequences as Mike, Dhani, Vijay, Spike, and their cohorts – including Vijay’s father Ganesh (Shapoor Batliwalla) and father-daughter bus passengers Professor Myers (Bernard Curry) and Starr Myers (Grace O’Sullivan) – attempt to survive the relentless attacks of the mercenaries and their corrupt police associates.

As we saw in the first movie, Gurty was an Iraq War veteran suffering from PTSD and aphasia, which allows Hensleigh to drop in what I felt were unnecessary flashbacks to what Gurty (played by Marcus Thomas) experienced in the war, giving us a bit of a prequel in the midst of this sequel. I also felt it was unnecessary that a romantic relationship develops between Mike and Dhani, but I guess Hensleigh felt that Mike needed some love in his life.

Like my own father, my father-in-law prefers to watch action movies, and he definitely appreciated being shown Ice Road: Vengeance. While I felt the movie was a decent B-level flick with some dodgy special effects, he was fully invested in the film, audibly reacting to moments of action and rooting for the heroes to take down the villains. He had a blast watching this movie, which made the viewing experience much better for me than it would have been otherwise.

A PERFECT GETAWAY (2009)

One of the characters in the 2009 thriller A Perfect Getaway is said to be a screenwriter, so there’s talk along the way of the necessity of a good script having a second act twist. That’s a meta touch on the part of writer/director David Twohy, because this movie exists entirely for its second act twist. It’s a twist that some viewers will be able to predict right out of the gate, but it’s still good enough to make the movie worth watching at least twice: once when you’re not completely sure what’s going to happen, then again once you know, so you can see how it builds toward that twist.

Steve Zahn and Milla Jovovich star as Cliff and Cydney, a newlywed couple enjoying a honeymoon trip to Hawaii... and they have arrived on the islands just in time to hear reports of a murder. Someone killed a newlywed couple on their honeymoon, and the murderers are still on the loose. Cliff and Cydney don’t let the reports spoil their good time. They secure permits to take a long hike to a beach that requires trudging through miles of wilderness. And they’re not alone. On the way, they cross paths with two other couples: Chris Hemsworth and Marley Shelton as hippies Kale and Cleo, and Timothy Olyphant and Kiele Sanchez as former soldier Nick and his girlfriend Gina.

Any of these people could be the killers. There’s a lot of suspicious looks being given in every director. And Twohy takes his sweet time getting to the twist. The majority of A Perfect Getaway’s 90+ minute running time consists of people walking through the wilderness and talking to each other. There’s so much dialogue, the film resembles what a first-time filmmaker might have attempted to do with limited means. All that was required to make most of this movie was some film equipment, a few actors, and stretches of jungle.

Then, around the hour mark, the twist comes – and the action kicks in. From that point on, A Perfect Getaway becomes quite a fun, thrilling ride.

This isn’t a movie I could watch frequently because there’s a whole lot of talking that I just didn’t care very much about during that first hour. But like I said, it’s worth watching at least twice.

THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA 2 (2026)

My girlfriend made sure I was caught up on the 2006 drama comedy The Devil Wears Prada so I would be prepared to accompany her and her mother to a theatrical screening of the long-awaited sequel The Devil Wears Prada 2... a trip to the theatre that my father-in-law was also bamboozled into accompanying us on, as he thought we were only going to see the Michael Jackson biopic. We were actually having a double feature of The Devil Wears Prada 2 and Michael, with Prada coming first, so he had to endure this movie to get to the other movie. And he complained about it for the rest of the day.

The first movie, directed by David Frankel from a script by Aline Brosh McKenna, was based on a novel by Lauren Weisberger. Frankel and McKenna came back to craft the sequel, but this time they were creating the story from scratch, with no source material to work from. That story catches up with journalist Andrea "Andy" Sachs (Anne Hathaway) twenty years after the events of the first movie. She has become a respected writer, but that doesn’t stop her from being laid off by text, along with the rest of the newsroom she works in.

At the same time Andy is having trouble, her former boss – Runway fashion magazine editor Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) – is also having trouble, as the magazine has published a puff piece about a brand that uses sweatshop labor. Parent company owner Irv Ravitz (Tibor Feldman) and his son Jay (B.J. Novak) decide to save the magazine by bringing in Andy as the features editor, reuniting her and Priestly after two decades.

That’s the basis for a sequel that is less focused on fashion and more on behind-the-scenes business deals. The fact that Dior is a Runway advertiser brings Andy back in contact with Emily Charlton (Emily Blunt), who used to be Priestly’s assistant and now works at Dior. Irv passes away, Jay takes control of the business, and Emily’s billionaire boyfriend Benji Barnes (Justin Theroux) could be the key to saving the magazine. There are appearances by Lucy Liu as Benji’s ex, Kenneth Branagh as Priestly’s current husband, Lady Gaga as herself, and Stanley Tucci continues to be a highlight, reprising the role of Priestly’s longtime collaborator Nigel Kipling. Theroux was one of the actors I was most impressed by this time around, as his Benji performance is much different from any other performance I’ve seen him deliver.

Streep earned an Oscar nomination for her portrayal of Miranda Priestly the first time around, but the character isn’t at full power in this sequel. She tries to be as mean-spirited and tyrannical as she was before, but her negative comments are blunted due to HR complaints. Her new assistant, Simone Ashley as Amari Mari, is always trying to hold her back from going too far. My girlfriend was disappointed to see this lessened version of Miranda Priestly, and also felt that Andy Sachs was too immature; still acting like she’s in her twenties, even though she’s in her forties. Priestly had changed too much and Andy hadn’t changed enough.

I never cared about The Devil Wears Prada and only enjoyed it because I watched it with my girlfriend, so I wasn’t really invested in the sequel. Overall, I thought it was fine, but not quite on the level of its predecessor. As my girlfriend put it, they had lost some of the magic.

Our theatrical viewing was memorable, however, because this was the first time we ever saw a movie in a screening room that had chaise lounges in the front rows. We booked chaise seats for ourselves and the in-laws, and it was interesting to watch a movie in a theatre from a laid-back position.