Death Proof

dir: Quentin Tarantino
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I don’t think there are insults left to fling at Quentin Tarantino. The cries of plagiarism, unoriginality, lack of individual inspiration, immature fixation on the films of his youth, awful personal hygiene; all these barbs have been passed around and thrown at him for over a decade since he came to our collective notice.

And they’ve all stuck, because they’re all true. Yet he keeps going on and on, continuing to do his thing without giving a damn…

Death Proof is the Tarantino half of what was one movie when it was initially released in the States: Grindhouse. Grindhouse itself, whilst a wonderful idea that delighted all those shlubs old enough to remember drive-ins and the sleazy c-grade double bills that used to play at them and at grungy old cinemas that were literally called grindhouses, it didn’t set the box office alight.

As such, the Weinstein Brothers, in their infinite wisdom, decided to split the two halves, the other half being the Robert Rodriguez flick Planet Terror, and released them individually outside of America. Thus, we have Death Proof now, and Planet Terror coming out in a month or so.

I think it detracts from the concept, significantly. The main reason is that the whole package was high concept, and had a particular context within which it was meant to work. Take away the concept, the overall aesthetic and the ‘joke’, and you’re left with another mediocre flick based upon a 70s ideal which does little more than ape whatever it is that Tarantino liked about a few trashy 70s flicks.

Admittedly, the three hour running time for Grindhouse was probably its greatest obstacle to finding a mass audience, but I still think the Weinsteins should have bit the bullet and stayed on target. Because Death Proof alone is more of a curiousity than an enjoyable film.

Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell) is, surprisingly enough, a stuntman with a revved up stunt car who likes to kill young, hot women. With his car. It doesn’t get any more dysfunctional or more obviously phallic than that. Half of the flick is him languidly stalking one group of women who he intends to kill. The other half is him trying to kill a different group of hot, young women.

Arlene (Vanessa Furlito), Jungle Julia (Sydney Poitier), and Shanna (Jordan Ladd) are having a night out on the town in Texas before going away for a weekend at a cabin by a lake. As they drink and drink, and play records on the jukebox, and drink more, and talk about boys, and drink more, they notice they are being watched by a grizzled stranger, who occasionally chats with them. Also at the bar is a girl (the always sick looking Rose McGowan) hoping for a ride home.

This sequence goes on and on, without much to really sink your teeth into. You notice that there are an incredible amount of shots where women’s feet and asses are lovingly filmed by the camera. You notice that the editing and the film stock are deliberately clunky and grainy in order to look like the 70s flicks it is trying to approximate. You notice that Tarantino has to go out of his way to remind you that he is so fucking cool when he explicitly has to bring up whatever obscure 70s songs are playing in his own movie, or what flicks he is referencing. And of course you notice that Tarantino has to appear in his own flick as the bartender.

You might also notice that there’s not a lot going on. It doesn’t really matter, though. If you’re not overly attached to the lovely ladies of the first half, they’re all going to be dead soon anyway.

Murderous Stuntman Mike will see to that, in spectacularly violent fashion. His car, you see, is death proof, but only for the driver’s side. Otherwise, it’s a killing machine.

In the second half we get a different group of women and a different group of movies to pay homage to. Abernathy (Rosario Dawson), Kim (Tracie Thorns), Lee (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) all work in the film industry, and are on the way to meet a friend of theirs at the airport in Tennessee. Their friend is a New Zealand stuntwoman called Zoë Bell, who, oddly, plays herself.

As far as I can work out, Bell’s claim to fame is that she did all the stunt double work for Uma Thurman in Kill Bill. It’s also quite possible that she made the ultimate sacrifice in order to ‘encourage’ Quentin to give her a speaking role in Death Proof. I shudder to think how she did that encouragement, but I will say that paying dues only gets you so far.

For reasons too bone-wearying to go in to, the ‘girls’ end up in an old car called a Dodge Challenger, being chased by Stuntman Mike. They manage to turn the tables on Mike, and go all Faster Pussycat, Kill Kill! on him.

The end.

Some of the references are obscure, some are made painfully explicit, and nowhere is it more painful than when you have to explicitly have characters refer to the older films you’re homaging: If you have to have your characters actually say “like in Vanishing Point”, then you’re reminding people that they could be watching a better flick than the one they’re actually watching, Quentin.

Truth is, whilst I think the flick is fairly weak even within its modest goals, I didn’t hate the flick. I enjoyed spending time with both groups of women, even if they don’t do anything that spectacular. The dialogue may not be all wit and brilliance, but I wouldn’t expect a flick trying to replicate the kinds of trashy movies that this is to do too much different. And Kurt Russell is a delight as the bad guy, as he is in most anything he’s ever done over the last 100 years.

If I had one major problem with any of the sequences, it was the one where crazy stuntwoman Bell decides she wants to sprawl across the bonnet of the Challenger as it’s being driven at high speed. It’s not the fact that she wants to do it that irks: it’s the fact that for the sequence to continue once Stuntman Mike starts attacking them, all the participants have to take leave of their senses. It strikes me as the height of dumbness that considering the multiple opportunities Bell has to get back in the car, the fact that they all act likes idiots to keep her there just reveals how silly the whole thing is.

Still, you’re watching a Quentin Tarantino film, so silliness is part of the contract. It’s pointless to berate Tarantino for never being able to create something that references something else: if he was ever going to work differently, he would have done it at some other stage over the last seventeen years. By now, we should know as well as he does that he can’t really do much else. I thought Kill Bill would have gotten it out of his system, but really, all he’s done is point out where the boundaries of his interest lie.

It’s not as entertaining as many of his previous films, especially since there are long stretches of the flick that are fairly flat, but there is some amusement to be derived. I don’t have a deep love or reverence for the era or the movies he constantly references, but I’m enough of a film fan to enjoy the fact that there are references to enjoy.

It’s the less entertaining of the two Grindhouse flicks, but that’s a different review. Overall I’d lean towards declaring the whole Grindhouse escapade something of a failure, but an interesting failure all the same. And there’s many a time that I’d prefer a film that tries something and fails over one that boringly achieves its modest and pointless goals.

6 times Tarantino’s fetishes are getting to be tiresome out of 10

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“Is it safe?”
- “It's better than safe. It's death proof.” – Thunder Bolt!, I mean, Death Proof.