You're going to think I'm a turd for saying this, but : RESERVOIR DOGS is my favourite Quentin Tarantino movie. He's always been a very hit-and-miss director to me and it's especially true in his post-JACKIE BROWN era. I'll give him that his movie are pretty uncompromising, though. So it's good to know he's still in business and still making blockbusters with their own sense of identity. In 2007, he made DEATH PROOF as the closing half of the drive-in double header extravaganza GRINDHOUSE he directed with his pal Robert Rodriguez. It is supposed to be a tribute to 1970s horror movies featuring cars such as THE VANISHING, but to be honest, it's just a bad film. Tarantino's worst, by far.
So, DEATH PROOF is split in two halves. In the first part, a band of girls meet Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell) on their night out. They're having fun together, laughing, drinking, mirroring false hopes to whatever men they meet. However, Stuntman Mike doesn't seem to buy their girl power act and score some poon in front of them anyway. Mike has his own weird way of scoring poon. The second part of DEATH PROOF is about another band of girls, who seem to be traveling through the country for whatever reason *. They don't have anything to do with Stuntman Mike whatsoever, except that they meet him on the road by pure misfortune. You don't want to meet Mike on the road, but you don't necessarily want to play with a bunch of friends' lives in the middle of nowhere. Turns out these chicks can drive and would love nothing more than stick it to Stuntman Mike and his stupid phallus.
There is one, huge problem with DEATH PROOF. The entire movie exists solely for its epic, 25 minutes last scene. It is a great scene and 25 minutes is about 25% of the film, but it's everything else that is extremely lazy filmmaking. Most of the dialogue scenes are LONG, WINDED and INANE. They're not even related to what's going on in the freakin' movie!!! It's like Quentin Tarantino scraped every pages of circular dialogue from his drawers and pieced them up together. There is even a scene featuring characters from PLANET TERROR that splits DEATH PROOF in halves, which is a clever idea, but the dialogue never ENDS. Seriously guys, it's so long and self-congratulating I would've cried if I liked Tarantino a little more than I actually do. It was sad. The worst one was, by far, a re-creation of the RESERVOIR DOGS infamous breakfast scene, but with girls sharing travel stories instead. It was so long that I actually gave up, took a bathroom break without pausing, had a glass of apple juice AND THE SCENE WAS STILL NOT OVER. The girls were still talking about all kinds of shit that didn't have anything to do with the movie.
The presence of Rosario Dawson is, by far, the best thing about this movie.
It's too bad, because I really dig Rosario Dawson. She is an underrated talent with a subtle, textured emotional range that most actresses who had their faces sandpapered by plastic surgeons can't even dream about. She's not bad in DEATH PROOF, she's winging it in her own, earnest way but her part doesn't require anything special out of her. Still, I was glad she was there, like when you're glad to see an old friend show up in bizarre, uncomfortable evening. But seriously guy, free Rosario Dawson! Enough with the girl next door parts and the hollow, sexy supporting cast performance. She's got some lead cast potential. To be honest, I didn't know any of the other girls that played alongside her in DEATH PROOF. I thought Zoë Bell did OK and that the black chick was a black chick stereotype, but otherwise, I had nothing to do during DEATH PROOF except to let my Rosario Dawson creepy infatuation take over.
I guess GRINDHOUSE was kind of cool. If you put every piece of footage back to back, the good outweights the bad. DEATH PROOF, as a standalone movie, blows though. I've had the debate with a couple fans of the movie already, I know there is a lot of insight about a specific type of 70s movies. The car chase scene is pretty darn cool, I'll admit, but it doesn't excuse the painful first hour. It was violence made to my brain, like a dumb, insulting spinoff of the type of movie Quentin Tarantino usually makes. Fortunately, I watched this movie about seven years too late, I would've freaked out if I had seen it in theaters. I would've thought Tarantino lost all the talent he had. But since I don't take him too seriously **, I'll just shake my head and move to the next film.
* Maybe it was said, but my mind had quit by then.
** At least not anymore. Tarantino is like a gateway drug into cinema. The person who tells you he or she is really into movies and say his/her favourite director is Quentin Tarantino is the same persone who will tell you he/she is WAY into noir and his/her favourite author is Raymond Chandler.
** At least not anymore. Tarantino is like a gateway drug into cinema. The person who tells you he or she is really into movies and say his/her favourite director is Quentin Tarantino is the same persone who will tell you he/she is WAY into noir and his/her favourite author is Raymond Chandler.
