The Movie: 5/10
This was an odd movie, full of odd choices. The first 1/4 of the movie features voiceovers, which isn’t odd by itself, but the way they are implemented make them very strange. The voices are of the characters onscreen, and they’re conversing with each other, referencing things that the characters are doing onscreen, but the characters onscreen are not talking in the scene. It’s as if they’re having a psychic conversation, which I don’t believe is the intention behind it. Even stranger, the movie begins to cut to scenes still featuring the characters, but the voiceovers are now from conversations happening elsewhere in space and time, despite the characters clearly onscreen, again, not talking. It’s about 20 minutes before we actually see a scene with dialogue happening in real time, with the mouths moving in sync with the dialogue.
The movie also makes use of what seems to be a staple of 70s car chase movie: the vignette. The movie will cutaway to new characters, for a scene that lasts anywhere from 5 seconds to 2 minutes, and generally ends with the person’s car being stolen or crashed into. The scenes are almost exclusively played up for comic relief (often, shockingly, ineffectually) but sometimes take an odd turn: a young couple admiring their first home are then crashed into by a police car at high speed, almost certainly injured or possibly dead. This isn’t too much of a leap to assume, since major pileups are cut back to in the movie and we see the carnage of the aftermath: a dazed young woman, her face covered in blood, staring numbly at a group of people trying to pull a man from a flaming car. How are we supposed to feel about our main character if he’s responsible for all this mayhem? I’m not giving the director credit for moral ambiguity here because even though the guy’s a car thief and supposedly a bad guy, he makes a big deal about showing him as a hero despite it: there’s a scene in which over a million dollars worth of heroin is found in one of their recently stolen cars and. despite the urging of his partner to sell it and make them all rich, our hero takes it out and burns it so the evil drugs don’t make it onto the street.
The whole thing, combined with the fact that the movie ends abruptly once the car chase has run its course, further proving the the “story” was just window dressing for the chase, is pretty bad. However…
The Chase: 8/10
If not for a few of the vignettes that dragged the 40 minute sequence down, it was pretty awesome. They even go back to the well three times for the “he’s surrounded, how’s he’s going to get out of this one?” bit and each time it’s actually pretty intense. The guy delivers on the carnage front, and the aforementioned 93 wrecked cars are each dispatched with such loving care that JG Ballard probably watches this movie while having sex. It may even be worth renting the movie and just jumping straight into the chase sequence. Trust me, you won’t miss anything.
