Reservation Road is directed by Terry George (Hotel Rwanda), and stars Joaquin Phoenix (The Village, Walk The Line), Mark Ruffalo (Collateral, Zodiac), Jennifer Connelly (House Of Sand And Fog, Blood Diamond), and Mira Sorvino (Gods And Generals, Human Trafficking). The film is based on the book by John Burnham Schwartz, and follows the life of a man whose son is killed in a hit-and-run. With law enforcement not doing anything to help his case any, he considers vigilante justice - and in a strange twist of fate, the lawyer he hires to help in his pursuits is the very man who killed his son. ***

Reservation Road is not a horrible movie, but it definitely fell short of this reviewer's expectations. The whole “having someone close to you die and so you seek justice” thing…. Hasn't this been done to death? It doesn't help things that plenty of other films this year have explored the very same theme (Death Sentence and The Brave One come to mind.) Reservation Road brings nothing new to the table for this type of film. We get an all-star cast, and some decent performances, but the end result is less than the sum of its parts. ***

In addition to its issues, director Terry George can't seem to decide which side of the conflict he would rather focus on, and as a result the film comes off as uneven. The victim's side of things is, to say the least, nothing we haven't seen before. If you've seen a movie in which someone in a family gets killed, you've more or less seen this part of the story. And as for the killer's side of things, we never quite get to bond with the character. I was intrigued (and in some ways impressed) that the film tried to convey both sides of the story, something rarely touched upon in this type of film. But the effort tends to fall flat, and it doesn't really work on either end of the spectrum. What we get here is a middle-of-the-road film. Not horrible, but far from great. ---

Image And Sound:

Being a new release, the image and sound quality are both terrific. There's nothing really worth complaining about here, as a whole the DVD is a triumph in both areas. ---

For the DVD of the film, we get some deleted scenes, a “looking back” featurette, and an episode of the TV series Friday Night Lights. Not a whole lot of extras to speak of, but I wish Universal had ditched the Friday Night Lights episode in favor of some more features that had relevance to the film.

Final Words: