When professional truck racer Roger (Thiago Martins) loses his father in an accident, he has to turn to a life of crime to pay off all of his father's debts while keeping his team employed on the Brazilian Netflix original film Overhaul (Maximum Load). , directed by Tomás Portella and written by Leandro Soares. The film starts off rather unintelligibly, but as things get worse and more dangerous for Roger, some initially wayward elements eventually end up in mediocrity.
The first half hour of Overhaul is basically one long montage where anything potentially interesting about racing or robbing is cut into such small pieces that it loses all luster. It attempts to use classic heist editing with quick clips to create excitement in both Roger's running and heisting lives, but instead completely eliminates all characterization. At least, from the protagonist. The bad guys are all your run-of-the-mill cartoons, so they're easy to understand instantly.
Director: Tomas Portella
Writer: Leandro Soares
Stars: Milhem Cortaz, Raphael Logam, Thiago Martins
But Roger is, apparently inadvertently, completely unlikeable for the first half of the movie, and not in a love-him-or-hate-him kind of way. Rather, at first he's just an empty vessel for the plot to move forward. His only characteristic is a bad mood, and his only motivation is a lame drive for self-preservation.
Fortunately, once the film reaches the halfway point and the plot takes a dramatic turn into unpredictable but more welcome territory, Roger perks up. But his best friend Danilo (Raphael Logam) basically has nothing going for him from start to finish, and his rival/end Rainha (Sheron Menezzes) spends almost the entire movie until a final redemptive scene as a straw man and inexplicably object. lightly dressed for eventual artificial romantic affection. This is not problematic in itself. It's just a disservice to the obvious potential of his character, especially when it's revealed later.
Action movie characters don't necessarily need to be deep to work, but it exacerbates the lack of coherent action in the first half. There are races and truck robberies, but the editing ties them together so much that neither is particularly satisfying, especially the robberies. The whole conceit of the movie is something you rarely think about: They hijack shipping trucks by separating the cargo from the truck and putting it back into new trucks. Every time a truck is stolen, there is an increasingly difficult aspect like locking the trackers and bypassing the wheel locking mechanism. But if you can muddle through the first half of the film to reach its climax, you'll be rewarded with more than one cool action moment in the second half.
You are also rewarded with a completely new and unusual plot development that takes some time to adjust to as it is truly unexpected. But once it settles in, it generally works. The new relationship at play helps make Roger a much more interesting character and allows the new player to shine quite a bit on his own several times. It's even the catalyst for Rainha to redeem herself a bit as a more valuable character than just her sex appeal, which is a nice bonus.
For action movie fans, Overhaul might be worth enduring the first half for a decent and unique second act of action. For racing movie fans, it has its moments, but they become repetitive after a while and eventually sink into predictability. However, the races have more technical depth than the average affair, and the way they are resolved is by no means a cop-out, to the film's credit. But still, its problematic first half weighs down the successes it achieves afterwards, ultimately making Overhaul watchable but not necessarily enjoyable from start to finish.
Watch Overhaul 2023 Movie Trailer
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