‘Road To Everywhere’ Review: A Long Road That Could Use A Shorter Trip

Michael Shoob’s Road to Everywhere begins with a question disguised as small talk. In 1994 Los Angeles, cab driver Jason Schuyler (Whip Hubley) tries chatting with Rachel, a passenger who eventually becomes his wife. During the ride, she asks him, “what do you do when you can’t relate to anyone and nobody can relate to you?” His answer: “Drive a cab.” Cute quip. Unfortunately for Jason, it eventually becomes his entire life.

Years later, whatever warmth existed in him has gone cold. Shoob drains the film from color into black-and-white as Jason becomes bitter and increasingly disconnected from everyone around him. Bad financial decisions during the 2008 recession have wrecked his family life. An explosive encounter with Rachel  ends in a car accident that leaves her seriously injured. Two years later, Jason is driving 14-hour shifts, drowning in bills, caring for her, and generally behaving like a man who has decided life screwed him first, so why bother being pleasant about it? Then Jake (Robert Mirabal) gets into his cab.

Jake wants Jason to drive him to Navajo country to see his grandson compete in a Native rodeo. Jason needs money badly enough to ignore the obvious question of why this stranger specifically wants him for such a ridiculously long cab ride. And off they go. It doesn’t take long to realize these men are variations of the same mess. Both are broke. Both are estranged from their children. Both are filled with past regret. Even the tragedies involving former partners share the same tune. The road trip essentially forces two men who have spent years avoiding themselves to sit beside each other with nowhere to run.

There is something worthwhile in that. Their conversations circle trust, responsibility, forgiveness, family, and second chances. Around the hour mark, Shoob also reveals that Jake finding Jason wasn’t nearly as coincidental as it seemed. I won’t spoil it, because it is genuinely one of the film’s smarter turns and gives the journey retroactive weight. The problem is getting there.

Road to Everywhere is in desperate need of levity. Instead, Jason and Jake spend much of the movie arguing, shouting life lessons at each other, or yelling some variation of “get in the car.” Hubley and Mirabal have moments of sincerity, but neither has quite enough charisma to sustain 90 minutes built almost entirely around conversation. What might have been an effective 20- or 30-minute short becomes a feature that keeps circling the same emotional exits without taking one.

Visually, the film is strangely pristine. Cinematographer Bruce Alan Greene captures attractive landscapes and carefully lit interiors, but everything has such a smooth, sanitized sheen that I kept wondering whether a heavy filter was sitting over the image. Some flashback material is even stranger. Faces and imagery have a glassy glow that resembles AI-generated or heavily digitally manipulated material. I couldn’t determine from the credits whether AI or substantial VFX work was involved, so I won’t claim that it was. But the visual inconsistency is distracting enough to raise the question.

Making any independent feature is an achievement, and Shoob clearly has something personal to say about damaged men discovering that isolation eventually becomes its own prison. But Road to Everywhere promised me a road movie and gave me something far more morose. There is a solid, emotionally direct short film trapped inside this feature. It just takes a very long drive to find it.