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March 18, 2007

Ferdy at the Movies - For Best Results, Bury This DVD in Asphalt

We live in an affluent society protected by the rule of law. Our lives are easy, and we have a tendency to value them too little. I am more aware of this than most, because the average life span of a cat in the wild is two years, and I'm seven years old.

This realization has led to movies about psychopaths that threaten the lives of ordinary people in order to teach them a lesson. Saw is a good example of this; Phone Booth is a bad one. Blacktop is positively awful.

A general problem we have with thrillers in this household is that Bruce doesn't like to see people suffer. In Saw, this is mitigated by the fact that the action of the film was about solving puzzles, not about experiencing psychological pain. This also helped fix another problem with movies of this ilk, which is that the characters are generally unpleasant or stupid people and it's hard to care about them.

So, we have in Blacktop a film about some unpleasant characters going through an unpleasant experience. The victims are David and Sylvia, a couple with a rocky relationship that is put to the test when a psycho trucker named Jack kidnaps Sylvia. Jack's truck is named "Goliath", which allows for a David-and-Goliath pun. Normally the pun would seem trite, but it's overshadowed by the triteness of Jack's transparent Oedipus complex. Jack explains that he killed his father to protect his mother, and then the mother disappointed him by killing herself. Honestly, Congress should pass a law making it illegal to reveal a film character's back story unless it's something vaguely original.

For a short time, an innocent bystander played by Victoria Pratt gets involved. She is the only likable person in the movie, and when she is killed by the bad guy, there is no point to watching the remaining 50 minutes of film. (I kept going so I could write a review panning the stupid thing.)

Blacktop is rated R, because if it were rated PG-13, people would expect higher production values. I suspect the scene that put it over the top was the one where Jack cuts off one of Sylvia's fingers. Although the cutting happened off-screen, the anticipation was so painful to watch that Bruce had to close his eyes. This is because Sylvia's maiming was pointless: it did not advance the plot in any way, and it did not teach us anything about the characters.

No modern film audience is going to accept a helpless heroine, so Sylvia does fight back at a couple of points, and makes several escape attempts. We, as the audience, know that none of them are going to work because we know that David has to be there when the bad guy is finally defeated. That, ultimately, is what kills this film. The try-and-fail, try-and-fail, try-and-succeed formula makes an excellent sitcom episode but a lousy full-length movie. You need to have some side quests interrupting the main arc or the audience will figure out you're just wasting their time.

So, if you are looking for a thriller with a big truck, rent Duel, and if you want a psychopath that's worth your while, get Se7en. Blacktop tries, but it doesn't try nearly hard enough.

Respectfully submitted,

Ferdinand T. Cat

# At Sun 3:39 AM | Permalink | Trackback URI | Comments (0) | More Ferdy at the Movies | Tags: Blacktop Duel Hollywood movies philosophy Saw Se7en thrillers Victoria Pratt

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