This road trip took the wrong exit (Freeway, 1996)

Freeway, 1996, directed by Matthew Bright, streamed on Prime Video, 3 stars.

Man, this movie started out great. Reese Witherspoon as an abandoned teen-ager on the run to avoid getting tossed back into the foster-care system, and Kiefer Sutherland as the suspected pedophile serial killer who gives her a ride. This was setting up as a banger of a road-trip movie with these two brilliant performers jumping off the screen.

But that scenario abruptly played itself out about 30 minutes in, and this film went completely off the rails. It became this weird unfocused mishmash of dark comedy and satirical procedural drama for about an hour before it ran completely out of gas as it limped into the closing scene.

Witherspoon is the reason to watch this movie. She was 19 years old at the time of filming, and she was brilliant. She made the first half of this movie intriguing and the second half endurable. Sutherland provided a great foil when the two were onscreen together. Unfortunately, that didn't happen much at all in the back half.

I'm not sure what happened here. It feels like director Matthew Bright had a clear vision for a solid movie but had no idea how to execute a landing. It was weird how this thing turned on a dime and disintegrated into rubble.

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