I’m not sure how to even start reviewing this one! – Will
Rubber is the story of a killer tire on the loose and committing acts of murder with his telekinetic powers after witnessing a giant pile of his brothers being burned alive.
Written and Directed by – Quentin Dupieux
Starring – Thomas F. Duffy, Cecelia Antoinette, Gaspard Auge, David Bowe, Devin Brochu, Ethan Cohn, Pete Dicecco, Wings Hauser, Hayley Holmes, Charley Koontz, Roxane Mesquida, Tara Jean O’Brien, James Parks, Jack Plotnick, Daniel Quinn, Haley Ramm, Blake Robbins, Stephen Spinella, Courtenay Taylor, Remy Thorne
This is easily the weirdest movie I have ever seen. It starts with a guy setting chairs up randomly on the road in the desert, then a car comes around the corner and hits every single chair. It stops and a cop gets out of the trunk, gets a glass of water from the guy driving and comes to speak to the audience. He starts asking why this or that happens with the response ‘No Reason’ which is exactly what the entire movie is all about. Why is there a killer tire you ask. No reason. Why is there a crowd of people standing in the desert watching the tire with binoculars? No reason. The entire movie has no reason and winds up being pretty funny. I kind of wish it had been a lot shorter though.
The beginning scenes were pretty hilarious and the set-up with the cop spells out the rest of the film for you but the first half hour or so is just this tire rolling around blowing stuff up with his mind. There’s almost no dialogue, except for a few moments with the group of people watching the tires journey through their binoculars, and it’s just shot after shot of a rolling tire. I can’t even figure out how to explain this properly. We’re watching a movie about a crowd of people in the desert watching a movie about a tire. Sort of. After the tire is done blowing up random animals and cans it heads to the road where it sees a beautiful woman and tries to kill her. Our friend the tire is hit by another car and the girl gets away, now the tire is stalking her. This is where some other characters enter the story. The tire follows the woman to a motel and blows a few people’s heads up before taking over a hotel room next to hers. When the dead bodies are found by a kid whose dad owns the motel the cops are called, along with the cop from the beginning of the movie who knows, or thinks, this is all a movie.
At this point the cop thinks everyone in the desert watching has been poisoned and that the movie is over. He announces to the other cops at the crime scene that the movie is over and they can all go home. They don’t get it and he forces one of the cops to shoot him to show them all that it’s not real. They shoot him and he doesn’t die, leaving them very confused. He suddenly gets a call from a guy in the desert who tells him that he didn’t manage to poison all of the people watching so the movie must continue. Now the cop has to try and stop the tire’s reign of terror.
Why was this movie made? No reason.
Did that make any sense to anyone? Probably not but I don’t know what else to tell you. It’s funny, I’ll give you that, but it makes absolutely no sense at all and it’s just way too long to care about. The tire blows things up, when it comes to people he blows their heads up. It looks great and is fun to watch but after he does that 9 or 10 times you start to wonder if anything else is going to happen. Once the other characters get involved in the movie it starts to get much more funny but also makes even less sense. I still can’t even decide if I liked this one at all. I think you could have cut about 30 minutes out of this movie and it would have been better. It’s not like it would be harder to understand but we might have gotten to the part of the film that actually involved other people a lot faster.
Killer tire on the loose.
The structure of this film seems a lot like so many other comedies to me. It starts out funny, flops in the middle, picks up towards the end and finishes with a cheesy finale. I love the movie for its complete absurdity but the middle section stretches on too long and lost me. The tires ability to blow people’s heads up is great fun to watch but also grows tiring after a bit. Couldn’t the tire have blown up other body parts or something? I certainly wouldn’t pay $15 to see this in a theater but I wouldn’t mind having it around the house so I could watch it a few more times while completely drunk. I guess it’s something that needs to be seen to be believed and it’s certainly not like anything else out there. Actually, it’s probably not like anything I’ve ever seen before at all. Extra marks for creativity there but the film could do with a few cuts here and there.
Under the marquee – Will
Agreed… Quirky, clever, and straying from the norm… and when it got ‘slow’ (including long shots, or lingering on certain actions/sequences), I tried to treat it like a 2001: A Space Oddessey type thing… where you just have to lose yourself in it, and enjoy, rather than having it cater to a MTV mentality. But, in the end, the truth is that it could have stood a bit of trimming. Keep the lingering shots… just trim out one or two of the extraneous ‘blowing up things’ shots, which really seemed redundant (aside from perhaps the supposed thrill of seeing yet another thing blow up).
But, that said, there still is an undeniable joy in being in a theater filled with people laughing because they are so (pleasantly and intentionally) confused by the surrealistic structure and events.
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