Road Kill

Observing mayhem and cannibalism, a boy trekking through wilderness with his father after surviving some unnamed holocaust asks, “Are we still the good guys?” This hipster question makes John Hillcoat’s The Road much less credible and thought-provoking than Dakota Fanning in War of the Worlds asking, “Are we still alive?” Hillcoat, whose suspicious taste runs toward the apocalyptic (as in the grotesque neo-western The Proposition), should have hit paydirt with Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road, but it fits his pretenses almost too well. Pretenses are all we see—unlike War of the World’s post-9/11 symbolism. Read more