There’s No Turning Back: End of The Road Review

End of The Road
7.5
End of The Road is an Action, Crime movie released in 2022 on Netflix. It stars Queen Latifah and Ludacris. While the plot is fairly limited, it is a decent movie with okay characters.
I enjoyed watching End of The Road, but wouldn’t watch it again. We see a lot of static characters and the plot goes nearly nowhere, but it remains entertaining and simple to watch. With a run time of 1:29, it is an easy movie to consume, but it feels rushed at every turn.
End of The Road Review
I honestly was a bit concerned for this movie going into it. Netflix has put out a lot of terrible movies as of late, especially ones that looked interesting and then sucked in hindsight. End of The Road skirts the line a few times, but manages to remain a decent movie. The plot is very thin, and the crime aspects are not great. There is a crime committed that the plot revolves around, but the investigation is slim. I wouldn’t call this a crime movie by any stretch and wouldn’t watch End of The Road if that is the genre you are looking for.
Our characters are decent and likeable, but there is pretty much no development or character arcs to be found. Ludacris’s character, Reggie, does evolve and grow over the movie, but only slightly, and we end up relatively similar characters at the ending. This only becomes an issue because the events of the movie are pretty traumatic and we don’t get to see the way this changes our characters. Maybe they do change, but the movie ends before that payoff is shown on screen.

It would have be awesome to see another couple of minutes showing how our story ends. Not every movie needs to end with open interoperation, and this was one that should have shown the aftermath a bit more. Our characters are enjoyable, and watching the development come to fruition after the road trip would have been a nice touch.
Brenda, played by Queen Latifah, is the most involved character by far, and the most impacted by our events. I thought Queen Latifah did a really good job in this role, but there was a few questionable moments. Not to spoil anything, but there is a pretty suspect action scene where she turns into a fighting expert. That scene made no sense, and either needed more context or to not happen at all. As well, she it doesn’t seem to develop all that much even with some pretty intense events. I really liked the performance, but the writing of this character was questionable.

The plot isn’t bad by any means, but again somewhat questionable. We take a very long time to get through certain events, and then fly through others. There is quite a bit of action in the movie, and it was an entertaining watch, but not a lot happens for an hour and a half movie. The best part of the movie was the ending, which contained a couple of twists that I didn’t see coming. It was entertaining and full of shock and awe, and a pretty appropriate ending to the movie. Like I said, I didn’t love the last 5 minutes of this one, but the previous 15 were really good.
Overall, End of The Road was mediocre. The action was really good, and I enjoyed our characters, but the writing felt off at times. The pacing was goofy and the plot was pretty empty until the ending. I feel like this is a popcorn movie that might be enjoyed, but there are much better movies out there that I would watch first.