The movie tells the story of law student and basically nice guy Harper, who falls into the bad company of Johnny and his stripper girlfriend Cherry during a drunken binge at a bar. Harper then is offered to kill his stepfather, whom he feels is responsible for the accident that sent his mother into a coma.
All the artfully composed shots, hinky situations and extra conceptual surprises can't make this "Detour" all that compelling beyond its crisp artifice.
in flirting with the parallel plotting of Sliding Doors (1998), Detour not only finds graphic ways of highlighting its character's moral choices, but also exposes those choices as an illusion in a world of dumb luck.
Detour is just film-school-ish synthesis, right down to the cinematography-midterm shot lit through venetian blinds and the anachronistic analog static on the motel room TV ...
If "Detour" appears a touch too familiar for its own good at times, director Christopher Smith puts enough of his own stamp on the material to give the story a fresh, devious urgency.
