Death Proof

.
Death Proof by Quentin Tarantino was something I'd been looking forward to viewing. I like some of his other movies a lot. Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction were great, while I liked Jackie Brown a bit less. Those were his best, and without a doubt Death Proof is his worst. Actually, Deathproof might be one of the worst movies anyone's made.

I know it's supposed to be a shitty movie, but it was supposed to be bad in a cool fun way - an homage to the shitty drive-in films of the 1960's and 1970's. It missed the cool fun part of the equation and totally nailed bad. So I guess in a way Tarantino succeeded in making the movie he'd hoped.

What made this so bad was that somehow the movie completely misses the mark on nearly all points. A major point Tarantino tries to make is how great some of the 1970's "car" movies were. Vanishing Point is mentioned many times, as is Dirty Mary Crazy Larry. Both of those movies are superior to Death Proof, just from the driving standpoint. Tarantino brought nothing new to the genre, in fact his work is a pale imitation.

The movie has no pace to it. It starts out slowly, and stays slow for seemingly forever. When we finally do get to the car scenes, it's a real letdown. Two minutes of screeching tires and a car wreck offset the lethargy, but sadly the movie goes right back to boredom for another extended period of time.

The boredom is from an overindulgence in dialog. Tarantino had a flair for interesting dialog, most notably in Pulp Fiction. Unfortunately, what he doesn't understand is that what works in small doses becomes tedious when that's all there is. Quentin, meet "Less Is More." Someone told Tarantino that his dialog was sensational, and apparently he really believes that.

The dialog in Death Proof is not sensational. It's dull, and there's way too much of it. The characters are not engaging, and they all say things that come off as very scripted rather than natural. I hate this about many recent films, and I think Tarantino is responsible for this very annoying development.

In these movies, characters always have the perfect line for any situation, no matter how unrealistic it sounds. People don't talk like that in real life. It's annoying as hell in a movie when every character sounds like a character in a movie, rather than a real person. Not everyone is cool. But in movies, they are, and they always have a witty goddamn line no matter the scenario. I hate that. Give me characters that are real and I'll care about them when something happens to them.

In Death Proof, the characters that die are nothing more than crash test dummies. I didn't like or care about any of them. Then in the crash, which we are treated to multiple times so we can see each "dummy" meet her end, it's obvious how little Tarantino cares for them. He literally treats them like dummies. It's weird, because he spent so much time building these girls, and then there's no point to their deaths.

Another big problem with the movie is Kurt Russell's character. He's a totally remorseless psychopath in the first segment in which he crashes his death-proofed muscle car into another car at 100mph. He does this gleefully, with no regard for his safety as he knows he'll be OK. Fine, that was interesting and we saw what the guy was like. But then in the second segment, he gets wounded and suddenly becomes a sniveling, whining coward. It's not consistent with how he was portrayed earlier. We're shown this total badass, a guy who purposely crashes head on at 100mph for no apparent reason. What happened to that guy?

The characters in general are ridiculous. At the end, all of a sudden these girls who were being victimized turn into martial art experts and killers. It comes almost out of nowhere and makes no sense. There's no transition from hunted to hunter - it's like a switch is flipped and these girls all of sudden become ninjas.

What's become apparent to me is that Tarantino has come to rely totally on style over substance. Much like his fondness for ultra-dialog, he uses his inflated sense of musical choices in this movie. I suspect Quentin is the guy who used to give people his pretentious mixed tapes and liked to take over the stereo at other peoples parties. We get it, you like the greatest music and you're way cooler than anyone else, now please get over yourself - we just don't fucking care.

As an homage to the grindhouse movies it's supposed to be, Death Proof just doesn't work. It's not grindhouse-y enough. It's silly and self-conscious, as opposed to gritty, scary and raw. I'd like to see Tarantino get his muse back and make movies that are original and interesting again. He's been wallowing in self-indulgent masturbatory shit far too long now.