The Open Road DVD: Review By Brian Gallagher

I kind of feel bad for Justin Timberlake, well as bad as I can feel for a guy who is loved the world over and could probably buy a small country if he wanted to. He hasn't had quite the best of luck when it comes to the movie side of showbiz, with his feature debut, Edison Force, going straight to DVD despite a star-studded cast and even though I liked him in Alpha Dog, he still did appear in The Love Guru. JT will have a chance to redeem himself next year in the Facebook flick The Social Network but his latest offering, The Open Road, is another dud, despite his and the rest of this talented cast's best efforts.

I have to admit that it was kind of odd just to look at the DVD cover and see Justin Timberlake sitting next to one of my favorite actors of all time, Jeff Bridges, but I was even more surprised to see this cast is fairly stacked with talent, from Mary Steenburgen, Harry Dean Stanton, the lovely and underused Kate Mara (which should/better change after Iron Man 2) and even Ted Danson in a small role as well. While I really had no problem with any of their performances at all, I had plenty of problems with the story.

The film opens on Carlton Garrett, a minor-league baseball player who is still living in the shadow of his pro baseball legend father Kyle Garrett (Jeff Bridges), and is currently going through a slump, as we see him fly out to end the game. His coach (that small Ted Danson role) wants him to start playing better and later that night he gets word that his mother Katherine's (Mary Steenburgen) heart defect is getting worse and they will have to operate on her. Katherine is a fairly stubborn woman, though, and she refuses to sign the waiver to operate on her unless her son does something for her: track down his father so she can see him for perhaps one last time. Since Carlton hasn't spoken with him for a few years now, he's rather reluctant and enlists the help of his ex-girlfriend Lucy (the aforementioned lovely Kate Mara) to go with him on this trip to Ohio to get his dad - who doesn't have a cell phone - and get him to come back to Houston to see Katherine. After an awkward time at the airport where Kyle realizes he lost his wallet, they decided to rent a big Hummer and drive from Ohio to Houston and, you know, they all learn stuff about each other along the way....

I usually don't like to use the term "wastes the talents of..." unless it's absolutely a 0-star piece of garbage, which this isn't, but it still is a tad surprising to see this much talent in such an uninspired, unoriginal film. Jeff Bridges is absolutely fantastic here, as you'd expect him to be, as Kyle Garrett, or "Lone Star" as he was known in his playing days with the Houston Astros. If it was practically anybody else playing this character, it just wouldn't be worth watching at all, but Bridges brings such gravitas and a wonderful southern charm and accent, with his knack for quaint Southern metaphors and who's always quick with a story about practically anything under the sun. While Justin Timberlake didn't blow me away as Carlton Garrett, he did get a chance to show off some more range than we're used to seeing from him and he turns in a fairly solid performance. While I'd (always) like to see more of Kate Mara, she did a fine job as Lucy and only furthered my ridiculous crush on her. It's not that she doesn't have plenty of screen time here, because she does for the role she has, but the more Mara for me, the better. Mary Steenburgen, Harry Dean Stanton and even Ted Danson do fine jobs in their smaller roles, but they only really even the film out, because almost every other aspect of the film keeps dragging it down.

Michael Meredith wrote and directed this film and, after a spot of research, there are two things that don't surprise me about how unfulfilling this film was (which would've been worse if not for the cast). The first thing is that the second film he co-wrote (but did not direct) was an AWFUL film that I had the displeasure to review entitled Land of Plenty, that starred Michelle Williams, which explains the bad writing. The second thing was that Meredith is actually the son of NFL great Don Meredith, which probably explains this whole ex-athlete father/son thing. While I will say that this seems to be a much better script than Land of Plenty, with a nice pacing to the story, it almost seems that he's still trying to write a powerful art-house film, even though that's not at all what we have here. The film is unnecessarily ambiguous in many ways, like at the beginning of the film where we don't really know if Lucy is a friend or a new girlfriend or what she is to Carlton, and it takes way too long to establish that. There's no art in just being flat-out unclear on the relationships to these characters. Sorry. And even if the uber-played-out road-trip scenario can be forgiven - which it hardly can since they go to tenuous lengths to ensure it will happen - the payoff at the end of the film is so cliché and blasé that it's one of those films where you wondered why you spent 90 minutes of your life if it ends this flatly. The funny thing is Meredith seems to try and throw you off throughout the film, with these little red herrings that throw you off course here and there. The sad thing is he should've used those smarts towards the actual end of the film, instead of trying to fool us the whole way and slapping on a generic ending that doesn't even pay off some of the original plot points in the film. Sure, the main resolutions are all tied up in a neat little bow, but there are still a few lingering points left hanging like the Chad's in Florida.

The Open Road is not really one worth traveling down. While there is a stellar cast who deliver nice performances, the story is definitely not the road less-traveled, full of unoriginality, ambiguity and loose ends aplenty.

Besides the Theatrical Trailer and trailers for other Anchor Bay DVD's, the only thing we get here is Behind the Scenes of The Open Road, which is a pretty standard deal with all the main actors talking about the film and their characters and such and we also get a neat little random video montage of the locations they shot in also. It's a nice, succinct little featurette that clocks in at about six and a half minutes and doesn't offer a whole lot of insight into the making of the film, but it has some interesting material here.

You can watch the film in either the anamorphic widescreen format, in the 2.35:1 aspect ratio, or in the fullscreen format and its 1.33:1 aspect ratio. Your choice... though I'm sure it won't matter at all.

You can listen to this film in the Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound format.

The packaging isn't too splashy, but I guess it works. The front cover just has Timberlake and Bridges sitting together, with Timberlake looking annoyed and Bridges looking fake-happy, with a corny tagline below and a title card in the form of a yellow road sign above them. The back has another corny tagline, some shots of Timberlake and Bridges with a decent synopsis, another road sign with the few special features here, three random shots from the film and the billing block and tech specs.

The Open Road is an average little flick with some nice performances and some heart to the story... even though it's not a very original story and lacks a lot of substance.