A couple months ago I saw the trailer for my favorite actor’s , Morgan Freeman’s newest movie “Paradise Highway”, I was pleased to see that it was released on the same day as Hulu’s “Not Okay”, which I had seen earlier today,, So this movie is a Thriller and it has a runtime of 1h and 55 minutes. It starrs Morgan Freeman, Frank Grillo, ( I just found out that we are birthday twins!, Marvel’s “What If), Christiane Seidel (Netflix’s “The Queen’s Gambit), Veronica Ferres (“Crisis”), Jackie Dallas (Netflix’s “Stranger Things”), just to name a few.
This movie is rated R for violence and language. It was directed and written by Anna Gulto (“The Accomplice”).
Onto the premise: A truck driver has been forced to smuggle illicit cargo to save her brother from a deadly prison gang. With FBI operatives hot on her trail, Sally’s conscience is challenged when the final package turns out to be a teenage girl.
This is a German and American co-production.
There are other issues here, mainly to do with the way this story falls into so many routines and clichés and or the performance of certain actors.. Those elements also get in the way of the melancholy, lonely, and pained core of the story, the director wants to tell us, the audience.
It’s not that Juliette Binoche, Sally, the truck driver who ends up transporting a teenage girl to keep her brother from being killed by the traffickers, isn’t an intriguing character whom is torn between her devotion to her brother and the awfulness of what she thinks she has to do.
It’s just that the material surrounding the character overwhelms Sally, her past, her and the inevitable bond that develops between the transporter, a victim of abuse herself, and the abused victim she’s transporting as they travel the Southeastern United States.
Sally winds up in this situation on account of her brother Dennis (Frank Grillo), who is currently in prison but will be released soon.
Visiting her brother one last time before his freedom, Sally learns that Dennis’ life might be in danger, and because of that he asks her to carry one last package for the criminal group whose activities landed him in prison.
When she arrives at the pick-up spot, Sally is disgusted to see that the “package” is a teenage girl named Leila (Hala Finley), but the organization’s contacts (Christiane Seidel) and (Walker Babington) threaten that Dennis will be killed if she doesn’t do the job. Upon arriving at the drop-off location, Leila shoots the man who’s supposed to take her to some new hell. Sally is now on the run, both from the trafficking ring and the cops who are searching for the man’s killer.
There was this one scene in the truck with both women and THAT scene gave me goosebumps, I was impressed by Hala Finley.
All the while, she has to keep the girl from being noticed by force in a scene that Bincohe plays with considerable anguish, even though that’s not quite enough to keep the persistent feeling that the girl is a pawn and the trafficking angle is little more than a plot point in this story.
Soon enough, Sally starts treating Leila with more kindness, and with unconvincing haste, the girl comes to trust the woman who’s still holding her captive and, for all Leila knows, still trying to hand her over to people who have or will certainly hurt her.
Noticeably, Sally isn’t the type, although she sure seemed to be for the entirety of the first act, and once it becomes clear that Sally does want to help the girl, there’s at least a little breathing room for the two characters to relate to each other.
The investigation makes up the second thread of the narrative. It follows Gerick (Morgan Freeman, world-weary in the way at which he excels), a retired federal agent currently working as a consultant, and FBI Special Agent Sterling (Cameron Monaghan),
If the chase plot comes close to feeling exploitative, this line of storytelling, as the two men follow Leila’s trail from the dead body to a house where other girls and women like her were kept prisoner under brutal conditions, provides some sense of the horrors of what Sally’s side keeps at bay or ignores to keep the chase moving.
Ultimately, though, Gerick and Sterling are just part of the pursuit, leading to some close calls (There’s little suspense in them, since there’s little reason to care if
Sally is caught by these two under the circumstances. There’s one scene that wastes the pairing of leading talents with a rhetorical game of evasion. There was this well shot camera angle which were very similar to those of “Fast and Furious” meaning you could see the tires of the truck rolling during a truck chase sequence.
With the movie Paradise Higheay, the director, Anna Gutto, tries to find a balance between the mechanics of a in your face Thriller and a more intimate study of trauma, but if the climactic standoff and twist are any indication, the former outweighs the latter.
This movie has a beautiful scenery along with a sometimes too slow, at least for me, type of pace. There were a couple of lines by Morgan Freeman which made me giggle.
As for the acting, I’m still in awe of Hala’s performance, Morgan Freeman is flawless as per usual and I loved his fight scene with a police officer, it made me too entertaining to me, during the third act of the movie. I wasn’t seeing the twists coming so when that happened my jaw dropped to the floor.
Overall I really liked it and I episode recommend it if you like melancholy and slow thriller but which still keeps you on your toes and you start rooting for either side, whichever you pick… therefore “Paradise Highway” is “worth a watch”!
For more information visit-> https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7469828/
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