DELIVERY RUN (2024)

New On Demand and digital download from Saban Films!
Directed by Joey Palmroos.
Written by Joey Palmroos, Anders Holmes.
Check out the trailer here!!

A down on his luck delivery driver named Lee (Alexander Arnold) encounters a mysterious snowplow on the snowy roads of Minnesota which escalates to a fight for his life when the truck driver begins stalking him and trying to run him off the road.

DELIVERY RUN is inspired heavily by Stephen Spielberg’s DUEL, right down to the mysterious, yet unmistakenly evil motives of the demented driver behind the wheel. Director Joey Palmroos and his cowriter Anders Holmes does a decent job of making things nice and dire for our driver for the bulk of the movie, keeping the pace brisk with a constant forward momentum. The best part of DELIVERY RUN is that there’s a whole other movie going on behind the scenes involving some kind of ancient rune knife, human sacrifice, and multiple abductions going on in the mountainous roads outside of this snowy Minnesota town. I like it that Lee factors greatly into this other story, but we as an audience never really are allowed enough information to understand the whole picture. While this might prove to be maddening to those who need to know the entire story and prefer movies that lay it all out there, I felt it was a fresh way of telling an interesting character-driven story featuring Lee as the lead, even though he factors very little in the grand scheme of things.

That said, the reason DUEL worked so well is because the lead Dennis Weaver, was a flawed but personable protagonist to follow the whole time. We knew he was a family man and maybe a decent shit talker at his job, but he was an ok guy. In DELIVERY RUN, Lee plays another fallible guy, but unlike Weaver’s David Mann, Alexander Arnold’s Lee isn’t as likable because of some pretty big flaws established early in the film. Lee is in huge debt, but still, when he gets a little money, he gambles it all away. While David Mann felt like an innocent guy trapped in a horrible race for his life, Lee has kind of dug this grave for himself and is kind of deserving of all of this horror due to his own poor choices. In the end, I didn’t feel as connected with the lead in DELIVERY RUN and while Alexander Arnold does a decent job in the role, I just couldn’t find it in me to like the character and that’s a big problem.

This also might be due to the fact that tonally, DELIVERY RUN is all over the place. There is a lighthearted tone around the whole film, but then there are some pretty gruesome scenes that feel out of place with the lighter, almost cartoonish tone the film has leading up these scenes. In the opening scene, Lee encounters a pissed off debt collector with a cartoonish thug threatening him to hand over the money. Later, Lee drives his fish around with him since the thug broke his aquarium. All of this goofiness contrasts extremely with the moments of high danger on the road, but it just doesn’t mix. Later, Lee happens upon the snow plow driver’s home, and not only does it feel like too much of a coincidence, but the horrors he finds inside just doesn’t fit the goofy tone of the rest of the movie. Even when the truck driver is right on Lee’s ass in the road, the stakes just don’t feel high enough because Alexander Arnold plays things more comedically than it should be.

So while I appreciate the chances DELIVERY RUN’s script took by not letting the viewer in on the main plot going on, keeping the focus on a smaller character in the bigger story, this chance just didn’t pay off for me. There are some solid moments of road rage tension between Lee’s little car and the snow plow, but the scattershot tone just didn’t work. Had the film committed to one tone, I think I would have liked it a lot more. I guess you could say I appreciate the guts it took DELIVERY RUN for honoring DUEL more than I liked the film itself.