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Paradise Highway is a knockoff of A Perfect World with Morgan Freeman, Juliette Binoche, and Cameron Monaghan in the Clint Eastwood, Kevin Costner, and Laura Dern roles (respectively), and with Frank Grillo thrown in for good measure — except that the measure in which he’s thrown is not good enough.
This is exactly the kind of throwaway thriller that constitutes Grillo’s accustomed stomping grounds; the problem is that he’s not allowed to stomp at leisure. Reduced to a glorified cameo, the movie shoots itself in the foot by giving the person who’s most comfortable in these environs the least amount of screen time. That, plus the unsound climax that leads to the obligatory sappy, happy ending, all but ruin any chances the film might have had of telling an engaging story.
That leaves us Freeman and Binoche. With the latter you get what you get; that is, Morgan Freeman being Morgan Freeman, which on this occasion includes him wearing, for some unfathomable reason, a pink fedora. If this is your coup of tea, then more power to you; me, I’ll keep longing for the increasingly unlikely return of Se7en-Morgan Freeman.
As for Juliette Binoche as a lady trucker, well, she’s too smart to play this dumb. I’m not saying all lady truckers are dumb, but this one in particular isn’t especially bright. Consider this: she sells her trailer so she can buy a new life for little Leila (Hala Finley), becoming in the process the girl’s mother figure or big sister or whatever. Now, it’s bad enough they both have to live in the truck cab, but my question is, how is Truck Lady going to make a living now that she has two mouths to feed and no trailer? I mean, this is O. Henry-type stuff if O. Henry were a complete idiot.
She’s not alone, though. I won’t get into the specifics of the climactic confrontation; suffice it to say that if certain people had been patient enough to wait a mere couple of days until Grillo’s character was released from prison, they could have saved themselves a lot of grief — and spared me the nigh two hours of viewing time.