Shit and run

It really must have seemed like a great idea at the time. Quentin Tarantino teamed up with Sin City director Robert Rodriguez for a 70s sleaze-fest double bill, Grindhouse, which combines Rodriguez’s zombie-schlock-splatter extravaganza Planet Terror (2007) with Tarantino’s offering, Death Proof, plus several fake 70s-style trailers.

Guess what? In what must be a first for QT, the double-bill bombed, was panned at Cannes, and was split into the two films for worldwide release.

Alongside the adulation, Tarantino has long had his naysayers – despite the obvious brilliance of Reservoir Dogs (1991), Pulp Fiction (1994), and Kill Bill I+II (2003, 2004), detractors have pointed to the waste of time and money that was Jackie Brown (1997) and labelled him as a director obsessed with style over substance, so-called sassy dialogue over coherent narrative – a movie brat masquerading as Hitchcock (and his cameos don’t help, either).

This reviewer would previously have pooh-poohed such as heresy, but no more. Just so there are no surprises in store, let it be known that Death Proof is, without a doubt, the worst, most self-indulgent piece of cinematic codswallop in some time – ‘great’ director or not.

Complete with all the 70s trimmings (‘Our Feature Presentation’ jingle at the start (charming in Kill Bill because of what followed), grainy colour under- and over-exposure, ‘unintentional’ jump-cuts, dialogue that’s repeated, get the drift?) we have here a story of auto-slasher killer Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell), a man who gets off on the high-impact pile-up.

During a near-interminable 110 minutes, he victimises two groups of four juicy babes (Rosario Dawson, Vanessa Ferlito, Jordan Ladd, Sydney Poitier (who has, to be fair, got absolutely glorious legs), Rose McGowan, Tracie Thoms, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Zoë Bell) with his ‘death proof’ 70s Dodge Charger.

Stuntman’s car comes from a time before CGI effects in the movies, hence it’s designed to allow stuntmen to survive any auto-accident, no matter how outrageous. He’s got a little extra juice under the bonnet, too – handy for when you want to pile-drive your unsuspecting victims’ car at 200mph.

Sounds like a riot, doesn’t it? Well, at a pinch, with the genuinely exciting mega car-chase that brings a blessed end to proceedings, it might have been, had it only filled a half-hour Quentin Tarantino Presents episode. Unfortunately, old QT (who also wrote and makes his inauspicious cinematography-director debut here) obviously reckons that 1970s visuals overload and non-stop, teeth-grindingly irritating ‘sassy girl talk’ will hold the attention indefinitely.

They don’t. They so don’t. On, and on, and on it goes – imagine the opening diner scene in…Dogs or the Jack Rabbit Slims Thurman/Travolta chat in Pulp Fiction extended to 90-odd minutes, and you might get the picture. As a result, not only are you brutally bored by the girls’ blabbering blah-blah, any sympathy/support for them in their plight hits the road hard and fast.

Worse, though, is the waste of Russell, a great actor from the 70s/early 80s films that inspired Tarantino and Rodriguez (Elvis (1979), Escape From New York (1981), The Thing (1982), in this doggerel. He’s not frightening. He’s barely sinister. Dark charm is about as good as his character achieves – and Russell has always had that in spades, anyway.

So there you have it. Will the real Quentin Tarantino step forward, please?

110 mins.