Filmed on a budget of six million, this movie made forty nine thousand worldwide and it's not hard to see why. Plot holes the size of Manhattan and a cast of characters that are risible to say the least. The sleaze factor is high (but then who gives a damn if the movie is any good - which it ain't!) Scott Glenn and Brendan Fraser as a father/son duo who own a brothel in Sao Paulo, who enlist the aid of a Nigerian dishwasher to sell a suitcase full of cocaine to fellow Nigerian gangsters. Glenn hands the suitcase over to the dishwasher and sends him on his merry way to do the deal and bring back the money with only the dishwasher's word that he will return. Hmm... Bound to be a doublecross there. Well, guess what? There ain't. And the gangsters hand over the money with no argument, even though they are armed to the teeth, the dishwasher is completely alone and unarmed. Okaaaaay... There's also an old geezer of a fortune teller in the mix, who tells the grandmother of a girl who has absolutely no purpose in the story that her granddaughter is going to die. And she dies. The fortune teller drifts in and out of the story for no apparent reason (is he symbolic of something? Only the writer/director knows.) The dishwasher is mugged but the muggers overlook the backpack full of money he is carrying. Okaaaay... Various complications, including a shootout between Brendan, Glenn and a transvestite who gave such great sex at the start of the movie that the original Nigerian scheduled to make the drug deal dropped dead. Hmm... (Only the writer/director knows.) An unbelievably convoluted plot that careens all over the place with zero credibility. Where the performances are concerned, Fraser does his hardest to flesh out his thoroughly dislikable character, as does Glenn, who has his legs chopped out from under him by the writer/director's unsympathetic backstory. Catalina Moreno as the love interest for both father and son gives a credible performance, though she has little to do, aside from being abused and insulted by Brendan. The one good performance in the movie comes from Mos Def as the dishwasher. Nicely understated.The movie was made on the streets of Sao Paulo, which is five times the size of Paris, but might as well have been made on a couple of backstreets in Brooklyn or Queens for all the scope of the movie. The contrast between the wealthier neighborhoods of the real Sao Paulo and the impoverished backstreets fails to appear in this flick. The dialog is graphic in the extreme, which only produces guffaws of laughter at the writer/director's expectation of shock value in the viewer. If the story was stronger (or more credible) the dialog might have worked. As it is, one merely chuckles at the naughty words.This reviewer virtually NEVER consigns a DVD to the garbage bin (paid good money for the damn thing!) but one viewing of this waste of time was enough. Watching the interviews with the people involved in the making of this movie, one has to wonder what they ever saw in it in the first place. As mentioned at the beginning of this review, it cost six million to make and only earned forty nine thousand at the box office. Those people who paid forty nine thousand would now like their money back.

...and it is, without a doubt, one of the WORST films I have ever had the misfortune to sit through. It is a truly awful, offensive, unpleasant, and ham-fisted movie.Let me get the tiny bits of praise out of the way right now. Both female leads are good, but totally under used. The film looks good, but this is achieved by the lazy trick of filming a city at night through different filters (here blue and yellow mostly). Also, Mos Def is good.However, the character he plays is a horrible racist stereotype, the "good and loyal black servant," that I haven't seen in cinema in decades! He's a decent enough actor, and manages to bring some humour and humanity to an essentially one dimensional role, but he must have been embarrassed sitting up there watching his Steppin' Fetchit role unfold. It's lucky for him that he wasn't really on screen that much.Brendan Fraser was AWFUL. I've never seen a good film with him in it, and to be honest I didn't know he was in this (just there to see Mos, or Mr. Def as referred to in the credits!), but he is a terrible actor. At some moments, when he was supposed to be portraying the low point to which his character had sunk, he was overacting so badly that at least four or five people around me started laughing! The character he played was incomprehensible too. In an attempt to have his character merely seem complex, he veers wildly between sobbing schoolboy, brutal sadist, doting boyfriend, and petulant cell-phone destroyer (after he threw his second or third phone out the window, we all started laughing at the idiocy of having the exact same "lead character is violent and unstable, he destroys phones" motif repeated again and again). Scott Glen was okay, I suppose. He did what he could with some of the worst dialogue ever committed to film, but his character just didn't have anything going on beyond some very obvious and heavy-handed moments with his young son ("see, he is a complex man, he is a pimp who loves his son, I am a smart writer/director!).As I said, earlier, both Alice Braga and Catalina Sandino Moreno are good, but have nothing to do except look scared and get battered.By the way, if you ever have the misfortune of seeing this film, please pay attention to the use of language. The clumsy way all the characters, even when it's a Nigerian talking to a Brazilian, transition into English is hilarious!The "plot" is a derivative mess of neo-noir clichés, and is so full of holes that I could have driven a bus up the red carpet and through the movie with no problems. I'm not going to dignify the film by summarizing it, but lets just say that it involves a drug deal gone bad, a crooked cop, a few double-crosses, and a wacky shootout where multiple people who've been shot still manage to shoot back and take their own killer out. Total bull, and ripped from so many other movies that I can't even list them, though if you've seen Lock, Stock and Reservoir Dogs (itself a near parody of other noir crime movies), then you've seen everything in this film's plot, done waaaaaay better. Oh, and there's an exotic psychic dude thrown in for good measure, just in case you didn't get the memo that read "Brazil is exotic."And so, we come to the worst part of the movie: its location in Brazil. There is absolutely NO NECESSARY REASON for this movie to be set in Brazil, other than to dress a super-crappy crime film up with exoticized characters (in short, racist stereotypes) and locales. As it began, I was hoping for something that actually engaged with the complexities of Brazil, like maybe City of God, but this film is the polar opposite to that one! Do not believe anyone who says this movie is like City of God! They share nothing in common, Journey to the End of the Night could be set in any city in the world. The hilarious thing is, I was watching it and thinking that here was another example of a filmmaker using an exotic/strange/dangerous setting to make a totally boring movie SEEM more interesting, and then the director, Eason, gets up in the Q&A session and ADMITS IT!!! Someone asked why Brazil, and he basically said "No reason, just wanted to set the story somewhere exotic!" And he had the gall to suggest that he was thereby doing something revolutionary, because this was a movie that wasn't about middle class white men! Eh, hello, you hypocrite?? The two leads are middle class white men!! The movie is about them, they just happen to be in Sao Paolo exploiting Brazilians and an African! They're on the screen the majority of time, and are the only characters with any discernible agency.I could go on and on, and I have probably gone on way too long, but I'm procrastinating on some work, and this was easily one of the worst films I have ever, ever seen... and I've seen The Avengers!In sum: the characters are terrible, most of the performances are as bad as the characterizations, the plot is boring and derivative, the dialogue is laughable, and the politics of the whole endeavour are deeply suspect. Eason made a film about some white men exploiting some Brazilians. He somehow missed the irony of his being a white man setting a movie in Sao Paolo JUST to exploit stereotypical ideas about Brazil...

Journey to the End of the Night has a wonderful cast and an interesting premise. From that starting point, however, its all downhill. The film collapses into such a morass of cliché, confusion, and violence that it leaves you wondering why you bothered to take the journey with it. Set in Sao Paulo, the film is (I guess) striving for a tone of gritty realism. Mos Def is, quite honestly, superb in his portrayal of a Nigerian immigrant drawn abruptly into a world of corruption. He is the only real winner in this sorry affair - the sky is the limit for this wonderfully talented actor. Catalina Sandino Moreno and Alice Braga also do not discredit themselves, but they are playing for a losing team. The film dissolves in a mish-mash of stock characterizations and improbable plot turns. "Good" bad girls, corrupt cops, drug deals gone bad - we've seen this all before, but here there is not enough internal logic to make us believe in any of it. Ultimately, in the film's violent, climactic scene, the cliché-level becomes so high that the sounds of laughter you hear are from people laughing at the film, not with it. Sorry to say, but Journey to the End of the Night is not a journey worth taking.

I saw this at the Tribeca FF on Friday night. The cast ensemble is one of the finest, the problem was the bad script and the out of control actors. Catalina looked like a deer caught in the headlines, the director could not seem to get her to emote anything more mild confusion. Brendan Fraser (of whom I'm a big fan) just spun out of control, it was over-acting that should have clearly been reined in. The death scene by Scott Glen at the end elicited many a laugh, which says a lot about the bad script. To suddenly come back to life just long enough to save his love and friend with the final words of "go...." before croaking was hilarious; I felt bad but could not help laughing out loud (actually I was hysterical with laughter). A big plus to Mos Def and Alice Braga, they were the saving grace of the film, obviously in little need of direction, I hope to see them all in a better directed film. Agreed that the cast seem uninterested or perhaps defensive during the Q&A session, but I can't blame them after the audience's reactions.