The Road: Side-Splitter of the Year

By Audra Foster

The Road was a pleasantly cheerful and comedic movie about a man and his son as they search for food and safety in a post apocalyptic world. The entire movie is really nothing more than a giggly romp through such events as hiding in underground bomb shelters to avoid cannibals, and hunting for food in giant abandoned stretches of land while avoiding cannibals, and shooting people to avoid getting eaten by cannibals. Oh, and a main theme of the movie was that there are vast groups of cannibals that roam the land looking for weaker people to use as fuel. For themselves. Because they’re cannibals. If I haven’t mentioned that already.

But besides the whole, you know, cannibalism thing, the movie was really funny and entertaining. I nearly peed myself laughing on more than one occasion—you really can’t help it. Viggo Mortenson, that crack up, is just so damn funny as a man half-crazed from losing his wife, keeping his son safe (from cannibals), and fighting off some sort of lung-ravaging disease. His portrayal of a paranoid man who has been fighting off cannibals for too long can only be called hysterical.

The young boy who plays the character creatively known as ‘boy’ appears to be new to the scene, but already it’s apparent that Kodi Smit-McPhee is going to take the comic world by storm. When he smiles, the audiences smiles, and when he laughs, the audience laughs.

But I think my favorite part of the movie is when everyone dies in the end. It’s hilarious. Don’t worry, I haven’t given anything away—you know right from the beginning of the movie what the end is going to be. Everyone dies. Because the cannibals eat them. The end!

For a real conclusion, I found The Road to be so fatalistically depressing that I was forced to seek refuge in humor to protect the fragile shell of my mind. But at least there is this hope: apparently the book was even worse.