Don’t Make Me Go is a road trip movie that doesn't travel very far

Most road movies are about the journey, not the destination. Don’t Make Me Go is the opposite: Teenage Wally (Mia Isaac) forewarns in the opening sequence that viewers are not going to like how it ends, and even a surprise twist (which we won’t spoil) won’t steer the film from its predetermined course. Then again, there are only so many logical conclusions to draw from a story about terminal illness, single parenthood, and teenage rebellion.

After suffering recurring and debilitating headaches, Max (John Cho) receives a diagnosis that potentially gives him just one year to live. If operated on, there’s a 20 percent risk he may not survive the procedure. With his college reunion conveniently looming, Max proposes that he and his daughter Wally set off on a cross-country road trip from California to Louisiana for the occasion, with the ulterior motive of reuniting Wally with her estranged mother Nicole (Jen Van Epps), who abandoned them both more than a decade earlier.

This kind of ambush never pans out well—on screen or in real life—but for some unknown reason, Max commits solely to this course of action with no plan B, instead of choosing life-saving treatment. Wally reluctantly joins him, after he promises to occasionally let her take the wheel.

Both “searching for a parent who walked out” and “coping with terminal illness” are themes that can easily drift into cliche if not treated thoughtfully. Screenwriter Vera Herbert, whose credits include the TV series This Is Us, deploys these tearjerking shortcuts to elicit visceral responses, but otherwise doesn’t do anything particularly interesting, opting for the most obvious outcomes. Similarly, the film doesn’t explore the intriguing dynamics between an Asian American father and a mixed-race daughter. You never get a sense of their relationship before they embark, or the ways it evolves during (or because of) the journey, leaving nuance for the actors to supply.

To that end, Isaac is wholly believable as a headstrong teen, while Cho’s performance is inconsistent. Max’s illness, for example, only becomes relevant when the script calls for it, instead of “recurring and debilitating headaches” exerting a constant impact on his behavior. There’s minimal discussion on how race impacts their relationship, and there’s no talk of grandparents or distant relatives to expand these characters from stick figures.

Instead, the film seems more invested in Max and Wally’s respective long-distance romances. Despite being fully resigned to imminent death, Max inexplicably wants to get serious with his casual-sex partner, Annie (Kaya Scodelario), who doesn’t rebuff his romantic overtures even after learning about his terminal illness. Meanwhile, Wally struggles to define her relationship with Glenn (Otis Dhanji), who she’s attracted to despite the fact that he ghosts her text messages, pressures her to send nudes, and seems still hung up on his ex. Herbert’s script also doesn’t tell us what’s driving Max and Wally to other people for support, instead of each other.

In Drive My Car, Kafuku and Misaki get to know a whole lot about each other and themselves just by driving around Hiroshima. Over the course of their cross-country trip, Max and Wally uncover each other’s secrets, but learn little about themselves. After spending an intense period being joined at the hip, surely they’ve bonded more closely—but we don’t see any indication of that change, despite the fact that the different landscapes, peoples, and cultures they experience together would be wholly conducive to those kinds of discoveries.

Director Hannah Marks lets New Zealand stands in for the U.S., a choice that becomes more conspicuous when Max and Wally spend so much time off of interstate freeways. Even if the vast, verité style American landscapes recently seen in Nomadland and Jockey are becoming their own art-house visual cliché, that touch would have added more of a contemplative edge here here. But Marks, an actress turned filmmaker, doesn’t yet possess a keen cinematic eye. We would suggest that the film belongs on Lifetime instead of its streaming-service distributor, Prime Video, but at least that soapy network has a point of view. Even for a movie obsessed from the outset with its destination, Don’t Make Me Go mostly takes a road to nowhere.