Derek Crowe stars as your requisite "man of few words" delivering a precious "cargo" in the form of an alluring young woman with severe issues in this low budget car chase movie evocative of everything from DUEL, to RACE WITH THE DEVIL, and DEATH RACE 2000, with a little bit of TWO LANE BLACKTOP and VANISHING POINT thrown in for good measure. You get the point, it's essentially the kind of movie we really haven't seen much of in 40 years outside of the occasional retread such as DRIVE.
While wowed by the numerous chase and action sequences, I found myself a little underwhelmed by the character interactions. The film promises a sizzling degree of sexual tension early on with Areyla Faeron teasing the audience (and protagonist) with a little bit of ankle here and there. Unfortunately it never really comes to much, even when she inevitably sheds her misgivings on joining the hero in his life of crime, superceding even the villain in her capacity for violent cruelty. We could have then delved into an intriguingly psychological take on a Fugate & Starkweather or Bonnie & Clyde, but the narrative just maintains too straight an arrow and treats her as a mere distraction from the main, less interesting contest between the two competing drivers.
Although director Fredianelli delivers an excellent performance as the antagonist, his character doesn't exactly exude the evil necessary to keep the tension high, especially as we don't ever come to find the heavily flawed protagonists all that relatable. He's certainly more realistic in that he exercises restraint early on, but at the same time seems superhuman in his abilities to always track the heroes down. His character has numerous encounters with people who get in his way and only late in the film develops into the homicidal maniac which we would have liked to see from him much earlier. I think what would have helped a lot would have been to establish a clearer motive of why he really needed this job at this particular time, and to have made it a little more about money or achieving some greater goal than merely satisfying his pride in being "the best".
As a road trip movie, the film wonderfully gives us a lot of outdoor spectacle and makes good use of the geography during the chase sequences. Since it ostensibly revolves around a trip from California to Wyoming, I would have preferred to see more Nevada and Wyoming landmarks along the way as everything feels pretty rooted in Northern California. All in all, it's not a bad love letter to a bygone era, but really could have been a lot more involving with a bigger budget and a few script tweaks here and there.
