tomsview If you ever doubted the impact that music has on movies just listen to Elia Cmiral's score in this film. From the titles on, it creates the perfect mood for this dark thriller set amongst the urban sprawl of Brazil's São Paulo.A combination of elements makes this movie seem better than it really is. Although it has a setting that is more likely to crop up on World Movies with sub-titles, I was surprised to find that it starred Brendan Fraser and Scott Glenn, and is in English for the most part.The film is set over the course of a single night. Sinatra (Scott Glen) runs a brothel in São Paulo. After inadvertently coming into possession of a large quantity of drugs, he is about to make a deal with a Nigerian gang, the proceeds of which will allow him to live comfortably in the US with his wife, former prostitute Angie, and their young son. He has the drugs, and the Nigerians have the money. He intends to hand the brothel over to his older son, Paul (Brendan Fraser). However Paul plans to hijack the deal and steal the money for himself. The plan starts to unravel when Sinatra's Nigerian go-between is killed; the Nigerian gang will only deal with a Nigerian. Sinatra enlists Wembe (Mos Def), a Nigerian dishwasher from the brothel to take the drugs to the gang and return with the money.This arrangement sets off a great deal of paranoia especially in Paul. Then, in the best traditions of the genre, chance intervenes to disrupt everyone's plans. Before the fade out, we are shown that there really isn't much honour among thieves especially down São Paulo wayThe setting is used to great effect and we get a feeling for the dangerous side of São Paulo. This obscures the fact that there are some fairly standard action scenes, and the downbeat finale also seems fairly standard for this kind of film. Brendan Fraser as Paul, taps his inner bad for this role – addicted to gambling and cocaine, in one scene he slices off the earlobes of a transvestite after a fight, and in another, to prove he is beyond redemption, he has an old man's dog shot.Scott Glenn always brings depth to his roles. He gains sympathy for his character despite the fact that he is not only a brothel owner, but has now also become a major drug dealer – showing how easily movies can distort values.The only character to emerge with dignity is Wembe, an unlikely hero who sticks to his word despite everyone's doubts, and attacks from all sides on the streets of the city.The film is worth a look just for the fact that a fairly typical plot has been transferred from the mean streets of Los Angeles or New York to the even meaner streets of São Paulo.

mannin11 Filmed on a budget of six million, this movie made forty nine thousand worldwide and it's not hard to see why. Plot holes the size of Manhattan and a cast of characters that are risible to say the least. The sleaze factor is high (but then who gives a damn if the movie is any good - which it ain't!) Scott Glenn and Brendan Fraser as a father/son duo who own a brothel in Sao Paulo, who enlist the aid of a Nigerian dishwasher to sell a suitcase full of cocaine to fellow Nigerian gangsters. Glenn hands the suitcase over to the dishwasher and sends him on his merry way to do the deal and bring back the money with only the dishwasher's word that he will return. Hmm... Bound to be a doublecross there. Well, guess what? There ain't. And the gangsters hand over the money with no argument, even though they are armed to the teeth, the dishwasher is completely alone and unarmed. Okaaaaay... There's also an old geezer of a fortune teller in the mix, who tells the grandmother of a girl who has absolutely no purpose in the story that her granddaughter is going to die. And she dies. The fortune teller drifts in and out of the story for no apparent reason (is he symbolic of something? Only the writer/director knows.) The dishwasher is mugged but the muggers overlook the backpack full of money he is carrying. Okaaaay... Various complications, including a shootout between Brendan, Glenn and a transvestite who gave such great sex at the start of the movie that the original Nigerian scheduled to make the drug deal dropped dead. Hmm... (Only the writer/director knows.) An unbelievably convoluted plot that careens all over the place with zero credibility. Where the performances are concerned, Fraser does his hardest to flesh out his thoroughly dislikable character, as does Glenn, who has his legs chopped out from under him by the writer/director's unsympathetic backstory. Catalina Moreno as the love interest for both father and son gives a credible performance, though she has little to do, aside from being abused and insulted by Brendan. The one good performance in the movie comes from Mos Def as the dishwasher. Nicely understated.The movie was made on the streets of Sao Paulo, which is five times the size of Paris, but might as well have been made on a couple of backstreets in Brooklyn or Queens for all the scope of the movie. The contrast between the wealthier neighborhoods of the real Sao Paulo and the impoverished backstreets fails to appear in this flick. The dialog is graphic in the extreme, which only produces guffaws of laughter at the writer/director's expectation of shock value in the viewer. If the story was stronger (or more credible) the dialog might have worked. As it is, one merely chuckles at the naughty words.This reviewer virtually NEVER consigns a DVD to the garbage bin (paid good money for the damn thing!) but one viewing of this waste of time was enough. Watching the interviews with the people involved in the making of this movie, one has to wonder what they ever saw in it in the first place. As mentioned at the beginning of this review, it cost six million to make and only earned forty nine thousand at the box office. Those people who paid forty nine thousand would now like their money back.

Claudio Carvalho In a dark and decadent area of São Paulo, the exiled Americans Sinatra (Scott Glenn) and his son Paul (Brendan Fraser) own a brothel. Paul is a compulsive gambler addicted in cocaine and his father is married with the former prostitute Angie (Catalina Sandino Moreno), and they have a little son. When a client is killed by his wife in their establishment, they find a suitcase with drugs. In the night that they have scheduled a negotiation with African buyers, their African liaison dies while having sex with the travesty Nazda (Matheus Nachtergaele). Sinatra proposes to the Nigerian dishwasher of the brothel, Wemba (Mos Def), to travel to the harbor of Santos, close the business with the drug dealers and in return he would receive a large amount. Wemba accepts but while returning to his car in the harbor, he is attacked by two smalltime thieves and passes out. His lack of contact with Sinatra and Paul leads to a sequence of misunderstandings with a tragic end."Journey to the End of the Night" is a movie about losers that have a second chance in life, but waste it along a night of entwined mistakes. None of the characters is totally evil, they are ambiguous and develop a sort of empathy with the viewer. Scott Glenn plays an owner of a brothel, but also a family man concerned with the future of his son. The addicted and violent character of Brendan Fraser has a deep trauma from his childhood. Angie, played by Catalina Sandino Moreno, is divided between Sinatra and Paul. Wemba, played by Mos Def, is a simple honest worker that accepts to participate in a dirty business to raise easy money. The excellent Brazilian actor Matheus Nachtergaele performs a travesty in a key role. Watching this film somehow I slightly recalled "After Hours", a comedy of errors in New York. The lighting uses weird colors (yellow, red, green) and together with the bad weather, highlights the underworld of a poor and dark area in the cold São Paulo, in a film-noir style. The story is predictable, there are many coincidences, but I liked this movie. My vote is seven.Title (Brazil): "12 Horas Até o Amanhecer" ("12 Hours Until Dawn")

ciribiribin Journey to the End of the Night is garbage.I picked out this stinker in a hurry. The synopsis on the DVD cover seemed interesting at first glance. Scott Glenn was in it. But most of all it was set in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Exotic locations fascinate me. Big mistake! The plot revolves around the owner of a brothel (Glenn) and his degenerate son (Brendan Fraser). The clueless pair stumble across a suitcase full of heroin, plot to sell it and divide the loot. We soon find out the coke-head son plans to double-cross his father. The tale is complicated by the sudden, unexpected death of their co-conspirator, a cocaine-launderer whom the father replaces with a dishwasher he hastily recruits from his brothel's kitchen. The story goes downhill from there.The plot is shot full of holes. As a consequence, I was tempted to pull the DVD and watch cable news. Instead I stuck it out. Another big mistake.Virtually every character in the movie is brain-dead and morally twisted. Fraser and his cronies are about as stupid and believable as the Keystone Cops or the Three Stooges. There is no character development, possibly because characters drop in and out of the story for no apparent reason (destiny?). Consequently, the action is contrived. Predictably, a bunch of characters are destined to be bullet-ridden, but by the end of the film, who really cares?To make matters worse, the script is a poorly written piece of junk. Characters repeat themselves time and time again, either because the writer thinks we're as dumb as his characters or he wanted the film to last more than five minutes. As a result, the actors either sleepwalk (Glenn) through their role or play it so over the top (Fraser) as to be farcical. All the other actors similarly struggle with the poor script and weak plot.What is the point of this pretentious tripe? It's hidden, no doubt, somewhere in the taglines ("You can escape anything but your destiny," and "Where life is cheap... and hope is priceless."). If you can make something out of that nonsense, you're wiser than I. This movie is pure fluff.Oh, and since all the action takes place at night, Sao Paulo, Brazil is nothing but a dark, yellow-orange blur. They could have filmed this crap under sodium vapor lights in the streets of East LA and you couldn't tell the difference.I rate it one star because this dreary journey is thankfully short and finally does end.