What’s one to make of “Highway Home”? It is potential to think about a extra profitable model that walks a tonal tightrope, however what’s right here can not help however really feel confused, and possibly even slightly complicated. If it desires to be a hokey ’80s throwback, it certain does spend lots of time making an attempt to ingratiate audiences with its many supporting characters, virtually all of whom are left by the wayside as soon as the plot takes over. If it desires to be a subversive portrait of a poor, largely non-white group underneath siege by the whitest and most sniveling of villains (Billy Magnussen, doing what he is at all times employed to do), it certain does dance round that subtext with out each correctly going for the jugular. And it desires to only be an enormous, foolish motion film … Effectively, it is startlingly mild on the motion, though the fist fights and beatdowns Dalton brings to his enemies are typically satisfying (Anytime the movie expands its scope to incorporate vehicles and boat chases, its origins as a streaming film change into readily obvious — it appears to be like … funds).
“Highway Home” is at its best when it is being humorous, and Gyllenhaal, taking part in an motion hero who gladly drives a gaggle of baddies to the ER after he smashes their heads in, is greater than up for the problem. And a spotlight have to be paid to Arturo Castro, taking part in a pliant and all-too-reasonable henchman, who delivers the movie’s best jokes. The remainder of the unwieldy supporting forged, together with usually gifted of us like Daniela Melchior, Jessica Williams, and Joaquim de Almeida, vanish into the background. However not earlier than we study extra about them than you’d count on, falsely promising that these many tendrils are going someplace.