Roadkill film review

certificate_15

ROADKILL

The first thing you need to know is that the film's title in the US - Joy Ride - is ironic. Once the ride gets underway, joy takes a back seat. Innocuous and predictable ride might have been a more accurate title, but would have been a tougher sell. In the hands of the competent if uninspired direction of John Dahl (Rounders, Red Rock West) things move along swiftly enough, but throughout it's difficult not to reflect that the film's path has been driven before and with greater skill.

The spectre of Spielberg's masterful Duel haunts Roadkill which also suffers from trying to do too much as its efforts to combine a road movie with a thriller all held loosely together by a romantic thread result in its failure to master any one plot convincingly. The performances by Zahn, Walker and Sobieski while accomplished lack the weight and edge to turn Roadkill into anything more than a frivolous distraction. The casting also typified the movie's desire to look good when a healthy dose of grunge would have been a better way to go.

Walker plays the squeaky clean Lewis (Paul Walker) whose long time interest with the poised Venna (Sobieski) looks like finally paying off when she accepts his offer to drive her from Colorado to New Jersey. The fact that he lives half way across the country and doesn't have a car is just an indication of the lengths a horny frat boy will go to in the hope of sex. The only thing between him and fulfilment is a deadbeat brother and a guilty conscience. Having splashed out on a 1971 Chrysler Newport, and clearly not conversant with the maxim 'no good deed goes unpunished', Lewis decides to stop en route in Salt Lake City to bail out his older brother and habitual criminal, Fuller (Steve Zahn).

The mischievous rather than malicious Fuller decides to wile away the journey by installing a CB radio. Having assigned them both with the suitably apt handles Black Sheep and Mama's Boy in case we hadn't quite got their roles, Fuller then coerces Lewis into playing a practical joke on a lecherous truck driver, Rusty Nail. When the joke backfires, the brothers find themselves the target of the vengeful trucker. In the 1971 TV movie Duel the hapless Dennis Weaver was being terrorised by a faceless trucker. Spielberg's genius was making the menacing truck the object of our fears. In Roadkill the focus is split between the anonymous truck and Rusty Nail's gruff vocal threats, neither of which solicit the same terror.