Around the Way

In the chaotic days leading up to Thanksgiving, a mismatched crew of multicultural operatives-exes, cousins, poker dealers, policy hacks, and a father trying to reclaim his daughter-pull off a high-stakes heist aboard a moving train, all under the guise of a luxury poker game. Orchestrated across secret compartment and legacy-filled detours, the plan unravels when their surveillance Blimp drone crashes into a warehouse that doesn't officially exist.

Inside that warehouse? Forgotten cartoon legends from the '70s and '80s. Scooby-Doo, Josie and the Pussycats, Speed Buggy, and more, preserved like an emotional artifact, and now recruited into the next phase of the mission. With the train barreling towards Fresno, shifting team dynamics involving estranged parents, security-sabotaging drones, and operatives disguised in a party bus, what should be a simple card game becomes a battle of loyalty, timing, and generational justice.

As law enforcement closes in, led by legacy Officer Buford T. Justice IV and his family of quirky enforcers, the team must improvise a scheme to halt the train, replace the demolished furniture, and play the poker hand that decides the future of their operation. And that's before they confront their next target: Lt Colonel Thom Blake, a military tactician wrapped in secrecy and corruption.

Around the Way is a genre-fusing story of legacy, found family, old tech with new edge, and nostalgia weaponized for justice. With the emotional grit of 3:10 to Yuma, the ensemble heart of The Goonies, and a pulse driven by Gen X soul, the heist is more than timing - it's memory, identity, and the kind of chaos only the right crew can survive.

Terence Pittman is an Army veteran from Palm Springs, California, who served in Desert Shield and Desert Storm.