Mitchell (Josh Duhamel) and Carter (Dan Fogler) are taking the scenic route when their truck stalls on a road in the desert. It turns out that Carter simply faked the breakdown to talk to his friend. They have grown apart since Mitchell's marriage. They get into an escalating fight over their diverging lifestyle. Carter reconnects the wire but the truck eventually breaks down for real.There isn't much of a setup for the characters before Carter does something ridiculous. Mitchell does have a moment of sanity by asking the old man to wait while Carter restarts the truck. They are almost too stupid to live. There is some bro talk and some relationship talk. The guys keep making bad mistakes. The situation stays with one close call after another. In the end, the movie will do with them as it will and I don't care if they survive.

It's difficult to explain in words how much of an impression this movie can leave on someone, especially if that someone doesn't think philosophically on a regular basis. This is an absolute must- watch for everyone. It's so raw and real, its portrayal of human emotions and the way we live in modern society and the effects that society has on us, the way we look at situations and other people... not to mention the utterly mind-blowing conclusion. I'd like to think of it as an open thought experiment, poking viewers to think of themselves in a predicament like the one the two main characters find themselves in, how they would act or react, and analyze their own frame of mind and how they look at the world around them. I can't emphasize enough. Watch this movie! It may even change your life.

Just like Death Valley National Park where Scenic Route was filmed. I was actually in the park while Scenic Route was being filmed. I drove by the main scenes location several times and even stopped to watch the shoot for a few minutes. For people like me who love this national park, the movie is good for two reasons, the story is plausible and the locations are familiar. Not Oscar material here but still well worth watching. For anyone who has driven or explored the area between Beatty, Nevada and Furnace Creek inside the park, the movie will be entertaining due to the dialog, action and acting but also due to the scenery and backdrops that come into view. Once or twice the local cops stopped traffic for a few minutes while a scene was being shot. Fun to see the wardrobe, catering and support crew out in the middle of a lonely stretch of highway. This movie brings life to Death Valley!

As I was this surprisingly good movie, I found myself making comparisons to movies like "127 hours" or even "The Descent" - movies featuring characters stuck in seemingly hopeless situations where survival seems unlikely at best. "Scenic Route" handles the situation a little bit differently. Like the former movie, the adversary in this is nature itself. Mitchell and Carter (Josh Duhamel and Dan Fogler) are on a road trip. Old friends, they've drifted apart and life has taken them in different directions. This trip is the attempt to rebond. But when their truck breaks down in the middle of the desert with no help in sight, it becomes a fight for survival against the daytime heat and the night time cold, the lack of water, and the wild animals. Like the latter movie, the situation takes these friends and ultimately makes them adversaries as they struggle for survival.Duhamel and Fogler play their roles very well, and the movie is smartly written and moves along at a nice pace. The dialogue seems natural - the sort of things a couple of guys stuck in this situation might say to each other. The desert setting is a wonderful backdrop to the battle for survival, and we learn enough about each of the main character's lives to feel a sense of empathy with them.My biggest quibble with the movie might be the original explanation for why the truck broke down. Without giving anything away, that seemed out of place. It introduced what seemed to m e to be an unnatural reason for conflict to emerge between the two. I thought the movie might have been more powerful without that - if we had just seen the situation itself start to take its toll on two guys who basically were buddies. But if that's a weakness, it is one of the few you see with "Scenic Route." The ending leaves a great deal open to interpretation, and obviously there is no definite answer as to what the ending means or even to what exactly happened in the movie (which is another similarity to the ending of "The Descent.") It's all in the eye of the viewer, who can interpret it as he or she chooses. (7/10)