The mother and stepfather of Harper, the main character of the film, were in an accident. The stepfather is not scratched, and the mother of the guy in a deep coma is in the hospital. The situation is difficult and tragic, but everything is aggravated by the young man’s suspicions that his stepfather may be unclean on his hand, and the accident will not be so accidental. One night, diligently pouring his grief with alcohol, Harper meets a certain Johnny and in the course of drunken revelations hires him to kill his stepfather. For Harper, these conversations were just empty chatter, but for Johnny, who urgently needs money, everything turned out to be extremely serious, which he informs the young man, appearing at his doorstep the next morning.
After a kind of small prologue, "The Roundabout" takes from place to the quarry, offering the viewer a rather unusual move: Harper faces the need to make a difficult choice, and the narrative is divided into two stories - in one the guy agreed to kill his stepfather, and in the second Johnny was refused. Visually, this is played by the most banal split screen, but in places it looks quite good, especially in moments when the director tries to fit a whole vaidshot into just half the screen. And in general, from a narrative point of view, this technique is also quite interesting, although it is a bit difficult to follow two scenes at the same time, especially given their detail.
This, in fact, is the main problem of “Bypass” – the film is too overloaded with details, and there is no devil in them. Christopher Smith, wanting to distract his viewer as effectively as possible from one of the two biggest twists of the picture, piled so much useless for narration trivia that at some point it stops distracting, and begins to frankly confuse and annoy. Fortunately, finally rolling out his twist, the narrative returns to normal, and then “Bypass” looks like an ordinary road movie, however, not too inventive. The second twist, which happened a few minutes before the end of the picture, at that time did not affect anything, in general, and I did not understand what it was for. Although, perhaps, this was the goal - to show that everything that happened did not make any sense, I do not know.
There are also questions about the moral component of the “bypass”. This, of course, is not “Cream Hackney”, in which absolutely all the characters were vile scum and scoundrels, but Harper, and Johnny, and Cherry, the main characters of the picture, the language does not turn to call positive guys. The director seems to try to present them in such a light that the viewer begins to empathize with them, but it turns out so. In the end, let all the main characters and became a kind of victim of circumstances, but how to act in a particular situation they chose. And each time their choice was far from the norms of conventional morality. Can Harper's only good deed make up for the evil he's done? I don't think so.
But enough about the minuses, it's time for the pluses, even if there are not so many of them here. First of all, I liked the cast and their performance. The most serious dramatic load, for obvious reasons, lies on the shoulders of Tai Sheridan, and the guy copes with it easily. Emory Cohen, who played Johnny, is also quite convincing, and in the scene of a meeting with the bandit Frank, he shines at all. But with Bel Pauli, which you may have seen in a very good independent comedy “Carrie Pilby”, and in “Bypass” playing Cherry, everything is somewhat more complicated. The actress clearly copes with the role, regularly giving out the necessary emotions in certain scenes, but the very hit in the image turned out to be somehow controversial, in my opinion. The main problem is that she does not look like the girl that every second man falls for, and this pulls along and distrust of her story, which is why it is impossible to take the character seriously.
As I mentioned above, I liked the picture. Even if you do not take into account the split screen, everything is done at a very decent level. It is also necessary to take into account the nuance that most of the events of the film take place on the way to Vegas, i.e. in the desert, in simple terms, and to shoot such locations without the viewer being sick of the abundance of yellow in the end is not such a simple task. And the team responsible for the visual style of “Bypass” coped with this task.
Summing up, we can say the following: “Bypass” – a medium-handed thriller in the guise of a road-movie, offering the viewer only one large and steep twist, and for this twist, it seems, and removed. If I'm right, then why Christopher Smith put the main intrigue in the middle of the film rather than the end, thereby killing interest in viewing a good half of the picture, remains a big mystery. However, to write off “Bypass” in scrap is still not worth it, and a one-time viewing it is quite worthy. No more.
5 out of 10
Thank you very much.
