Who would ever have thought that the plug ugly poster boy of late ’90s American cinema would make a film to be filed directly next to such dim-witted, artistically bankrupt rot as Scary Movie, Date Movie and their ilk? Like those films, Death Proof pays homage for homage’s sake, inviting us into the hoary world of seedy fleapit cinemas and micro-budgeted, gung-ho exploitation pics. Except this was made with loads of money and will be screened in really nice cinemas. So…?
Taking in the ultra violent travails of Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell) as he mercilessly prays on scantily-clad young women then drives over their faces in his souped-up black 1970 Chevy Nova, Death Proof – like the Kill Bill films before it – feels like a rag-bag compendium of oblique references to the ’70s and little else. Yes Quentin, we all know how good the ’70s were. Can we please move on now?
To give it that bona-fide grindhouse feel, the sound is muffled, the picture loses its colour, and the grain streaks are artificially accentuated. Ironically, such is the facile level at which Tarantino now pitches his once-hip, now crushingly tedious dialogue, you actually begin to appreciate the jumpy editing, especially when it saves you from a decent chunk of another dreary, self-congratulatory monologue which inevitably leads to someone saying how good Electra Glide in Blue is.
The director, it seems, has ceased making films for audiences in order to appease his own fanboy hubris by delivering another masturbatory boys fantasy with a keg of beer and gaggle of libidinous cheer girls where its soul should be. Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof is about as useful to cinema as Martin Scorsese packing up his camera to open a chain of tanning salons in Harlem.
Clocking in at an obscene 113 minutes, it’s an idea that would’ve felt stretched at its original double-bill length (with Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror) of 90 minutes. As such, it’s a low for the director, cinema and humanity. And who ever heard of a great car movie without Burt Reynolds?
