'Scenic Route' trailer: Josh Duhamel's very, very bad road trip -- VIDEO

Death Valley is a really terrible place to have your car break down. In the latest trailer for Scenic Route, Mitchell (Josh Duhamel) and Carter (Dan Fogler) have no idea just how bad it's going to get.

What starts out like a melodramatic, introspective buddy adventure quickly devolves into chaos and despair when Mitchell realizes that his estranged best friend Carter intentionally meddled with their pickup so that they could have a real conversation about life. In the desert extremes, Mitchell transitions from a clean-cut family man in a polo shirt into a Travis Bickle doppelgänger. Without giving too much away about the surprisingly plot-heavy trailer, it's a pretty striking tonal departure for Duhamel who has tended towards both weepy and comedic romance movies for the bulk of his career.

Written by Kyle Killen (The Beaver), and co-directed by brothers Kevin and Michael Goetz (Mass Transit), Scenic Route premiered at the 2013 South by Southwest Film Festival and was recently acquired at Cannes by Vertical Entertainment. Check out the trailer after the jump and let us know what you think about the anti rom-com Duhamel.

Scenic Route hits theaters on August 23.

Follow Lindsey on Twitter: @ldbahr

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