Parents' Guide to The Wages of Fear

There isn't much here to justify this remake. The characters in The Wages of Fear are incredibly thinly drawn, and there's nothing here action-wise or thrill-wise that audiences haven't seen many times before. Not much is established about the main characters except for the fact that they got mixed up in some bad decisions in a previously tumultuous geopolitical environment that led to one of them suffering in a prison. But somehow, this someone is also the only person with special knowledge of a particular kind of explosive, so he is freed from prison (and his sentence?) and is paired up with the very same brother who accidentally got him sent to prison in the first place.

This setup is brief, and not much else is explained, but the main takeaway is that this team led by two brothers needs to transport two trucks of highly explosive nitroglycerine across a hostile desert (full of nameless and faceless Middle Eastern enemies) and do so under a strict time limit. Perhaps most confusing is how the film doesn't fully explain why the villagers in the village (who are in danger) can't simply be moved and evacuated to another place (which, while certainly difficult, couldn't possibly be more difficult than the above setup). Nevertheless, on the team's dangerous journey across the desert, violence ensues, people die, and the movie plods along to its inevitable climax.