Three for the Road

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Three For the Road is a 1987 road trip themed comedy starring Charlie Sheen, Alan Ruck, Kerri Green, Sally Kellerman and Blair Tefkin.

The movie centers around Sheen as Paul, aide to a United States Senator. He is asked to transport Robin (Green), the Senator's delinquent daughter, to an institution for girls. He asks his aspiring writer roommate T.S. (Ruck) to come along for the trip. Robin is initially drugged by her father and put unconscious into the back of their car, but as soon as she wakes up she tries everything and anything to escape.

Eventually a romance develops between Robin and Paul, and he begins to take her claims of her father's abuse more seriously. Along the way they pick up Missy (Tefkin), a southern belle who has her eye on T.S. They make a detour to locate Robin's estranged mother Blanche (Kellerman,) hoping that Robin can live with her. Blanche refuses, clearly out of fear of the repercussions of her powerful ex-husband.

Robin eventually ends up in the institution, but her friends devise a ruse to break her free. This is quelched by the unexpected arrival of the senator, but at the last minute Blanche arrives and threatens to expose his dastardly deeds, including the rape of a babysitter. Thus Robin goes to live with her mother, free to explore the romantic possibilities with Paul.

The movie was a critical and commercial dud, grossing approximately $1,500,000 in the U.S. The film effectively ended the mainstream acting careers of Green and Ruck, who had been rising Hollywood stars whose past projects were huge successes (Ruck in Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Green in Lucas and The Goonies.) Ruck would continue acting in smaller roles until cast in the TV show Spin City (opposite Sheen); Green, who had played the romantic lead to Sheen in Lucas, did not appear in a mainstream movie again.