Synopsis

In the film four young adults (Melissa, Bobby, Kayla, Nik) on the road to a concert in Las Vegas take a lethal side trip -- and when their beater of a car breaks down, they make the fatal error of stealing a car belonging to depraved, homicidal, sadistic, maniacal, sociopathic trucker Rusty Nail...

Official Review

I didn’t care much for the original movie, so I wasn’t really excited about Joy Ride 2: Dead Ahead. That said, it’s a mechanical movie without a single new thing to offer the genre, but like your 1000th McDonald’s hamburger, in the right mood it might just do the trick.



This one at least doesn’t bother with the ‘funny’ hijinks that we had to endure in the original (mainly courtesy of Steve Zahn, a man who is only amusing in VERY small doses). In fact they are intent on getting things moving ASAP this time, and thus they have the least original setup in breakdown history. Literally, the requisite dumb character (Nik, played by Kyle Schmid) says “Let’s take this shortcut!!” and within seconds the car breaks down. Honestly, it seems to occur so quickly that it’s a wonder they don’t just turn around and walk back to the turnoff, but another character claims it’s been a couple hours (clever use of exposition to hide confusing scene transitions!). One thing I loved about Leatherface: TCM III was that the ‘shortcut’ is offered by a bad guy posing as a good guy. When the crazy gas station clerk allegedly kills him, the heroes see that the other guy was really trying to help, and thus taking his shortcut suddenly seems like a good idea. It’s not exactly Oscar caliber, but it’s at least reasonably clever, and makes the characters feel a bit more intelligent than many of their breakdown movie peers. But Joy Ride 2 screenwriters James Robert Johnston and Bennett Yellin don’t even try; we know they will break down anyway, might as well get right to it.


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