Never ride with a stranger.
Shuttle is a 2008 thriller film written and directed by Edward Anderson.
Two girls, Mel (Peyton List) and Jules (Cameron Goodman), are returning from a trip to Mexico. After meeting up with two travelers, Seth (James Snyder) and Matt (Dave Power), they board a shuttle from the airport with a driver who doesn't seem to know where he's going. It goes From Bad to Worse from there, and along with shy accountant Andy (Cullen Douglas), they soon find themselves fighting for their lives.
This film exhibits the following tropes:
- The Bad Guy Wins: At the end of the film, Everyone but Mel and The Driver are dead and Mel is being shipped off into White Slavery.
- Chekhov's Gun: When The Driver has Mel buy a very specific set of items at a store, it seems like an instance of him testing her compliance by giving her a difficult task and a possibility of escape to see how she would react. She later finds said items in the crate he's shipping her in, supplies to keep her alive in transit.
- Chekhov's Skill: Mel used her Signed Language skills to attempt to inform the police of the situation via a convenience store camera. Subverted in that even if she gave the license plate number of the parking shuttle, the camera in the store was not even functioning.
- The Determinator: The Driver shakes off car crashes, stab wounds, blunt trauma to the head, a bullet to the head... you have to admire his moxie.
- Downer Ending: Everyone except for Mel and the Driver are dead by the end, with her having been successfully shipped overseas to be Made a Slave.
- Everyone Loves Blondes: Played for Drama. The slaving ring is shown to have dyed their victims' hair blonde, presumably to make them more attractive to buyers.
- Final Girl: Mel. Subverted in that she fails to escape.
- Fingore: Matt experiences this when the bus falls on him while changing the tire.
- Hope Spot: After shouting for help, Mel seems to be finding someone who is willing to help her escape from the crate she has been forced into in the finale... but it's just a forklift operator who is in on the slaving operation, who moves the crate on to the assigned ship.
- Made a Slave: The point of the ring that encompasses the villains of the movie. Specifically, it is heavily implied to be a Sex Slave ring for white women sold overseas.
- The Mole: Andy
- No Name Given: The Driver.
- No OSHA Compliance: The security cameras in the inner-city grocery store aren't even turned on.
- Pet the Dog: The Driver may have been ruthless, but he made sure to pack Mel's motion sickness pills in her crate for her trip overseas.
- Sex Slave: Mel's presumable fate, like the Driver's other victims. Specifically, she finds a photograph of a basement full of despondent women with dyed blonde hair in nothing but the same white heels that she and Jules are wearing, while in the crate headed to East Asia.
- Shameful Strip: Done to Mel and Jules to break their spirit.
- Shoot the Shaggy Dog: Every single attempt by Mel to escape her situation is foiled and she winds up shipped off to Asia as a sex slave, exactly as she would have if she had offered no resistance at all. Worse yet, Jules has been murdered, not for fighting back, but because she has a yeast infection - so in the end, her resistance is pointless as well.
- Stop, or I Shoot Myself!: After Mel realizes that their captors have avoided injuring her and Jules, she engineers a situation where she tries to force The Driver to let them go by threatening to cut her face if he doesn't.
- Tattooed Crook: The reveal of Andy's affiliation is followed by a shirt ripped open to show off a tattoo.
- Wrong Genre Savvy: Andy keeps insisting that it's just a robbery, that if they all cooperate and give up their money, they'll turn out alright... And then, later, Mel believes that The Driver needs to keep them both alive and unharmed.
