![[box cover]](../../reviewimgs/h/highway.jpg)
Highway
The one-billionth "hip" indie road trip movie about nihilistic drug-addled slackers hooking up with a comely whore as they encounter colorful ironic adventures while outrunning gun-toting thugs is also one of the worst. In Highway (2001), Jared Leto sports a white-trash haircut as a philandering Vegas poolboy with a reputation as "The God of Fuck." With his faithful, confused sidekick Pilot (Jake Gyllenhaal) in tow, he goes on the lam after he's caught demonstrating his skills inside the trophy wife of a powerful S.O.B. On their picaresque journey to Seattle, these two unappealing antiheroes make the acquaintance of a downtrodden hooker (Selma Blair), a manic drug dealer (John C. McGinley), and an "Alligator Boy." Untalented director James Cox is about nine years too late in bringing this sagging material to the screen with any semblance of freshness, and Scott Rosenberg's coarse and empty script is pointless and deadening, completely lacking in the Gen-X charm that made the 1993 Quentin Tarantino/Tony Scott collaboration True Romance the standard bearer of the genre. Includes a show-stopping (in a bad way) soliloquy by Jeremy Piven that's surely not included on his resumé. New Line's DVD release of Highway offers a good anamorphic transfer (2.35:1) as well as a full-frame option, with audio in Dolby Digital 5.1 and Dolby 2.0 Surround. Trailer, snap-case.
—Gregory P. Dorr
