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Overall Rating
  Awesome: 19.61%
Worth A Look: 52.94%
Average: 17.65%
Pretty Bad: 6.86%
Total Crap: 2.94%
7 reviews, 60 user ratings
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| Joy Ride |
by MP Bartley
"Less than you want, more than you'd expect"
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Truck drivers in America must really hate the movies. Every time they're featured in a film it's usually as a psychotically dangerous killer. And so the trend continues in 'Joyride' (or 'Roadkill' as it's known in Europe)which takes elements from 'Duel', 'Breakdown', 'The Hitcher', 'Jeepers Creepers' and even 'Deliverance' to effective, occasionally inspired, effect.Paul Walker plays Lewis, a student about to fly home for the holidays. Until he receives a call from good friend/unrequited love Venna (Leelee Sobieweski). She's also off home and has broke up with her boyfriend. Hormones overcome Lewis, who decides to trade in his plane tickets and buy a car instead so he can pick up Venna.
En route to Venna he receives word that his older brother Fuller (Steve Zahn) has fallen foul of the law and is currently languishing in jail. Brotherly duty overcoming convenience, Lewis goes further out of the way to bail out Fuller and take him home. To show his gratitude and alleviate the boredom of a long trip home, Fuller installs a cb radio in Lewis's car and proceeds to wind up local truckers, chiefly one going by the moniker Rusty Nail (an uncredited Ted Levine).
Lewis puts on an alarmingly bad womans voice and poses as Candy Cane, luring Rusty Nail to a nearby motel where the two brothers are staying. Once there, they decide to exact revenge on an obnoxious fellow guest by giving his room number as Candy Canes. Of course this leads to trouble, as the next morning the man is found on the highway with his jaw ripped off and Rusty Nail evidently still pissed off at the brothers...
It's a protracted build-up that takes a while to kick into top gear. Once it does however, director John Dahl has great fun playing guessing games with the brothers and the audience. Trucks roar past Lewis' tin can of a car with no-one really sure which one is being driven by Rusty Nail. This builds up to a priceless moment where Rusty Nail decides to reveal himself.
Dahl also plays against cliche leaving the brutal attack on the motel man to the imagination. Whereas directors with less subtlety would have gone with over the top sound effects and sharp shocks, Dahl plays it out in near silence as the brothers listen uncomfortably through the wall at the banging and talking they can only hear faintly.
It's not all this good though. Too often it falls back onto the old 'run-stop for breath-there he is!- run' narrative to propel the story along. And for a trucker, Rusty Nail has almost supernatural powers at times, seemingly able to track the boys down at will and cover for any eventuality. However the action trots along nicely at a steady pace, ensuring boredom never sets in. And it thankfully avoids that great plague of modern horror: irony. It's never knowing, and it never winks at the audience, choosing to play its scares open and true.
This is helped by a good, solid cast. Levine manages to creep out just with his voice, and Walker cements his leading man credentials with another solid performance. Sobieweski also comes off well, giving an assured and resourceful perfromance that never comes across as a cliched screaming teen. Zahn, however is having the most fun here. He's a likeable blabbermouth that manages to get into trouble more often than not, but still retains sympathy from the audience. Together the three leads manage to give that rare thing in a horror: credibility. They never ruin the tension with inane jokes (Zahn does provide laughs but it's mainly to get our guards down for the next scare) and when running scared, seem genuine. The only time their relationship falls into cliche is when Dahl makes a half-hearted effort to suggest a love triangle between them. He wisely avoids this and instead ends with a terrific room switch trick taken from 'The Silence Of The Lambs'Ok, so it was in no way original, and wasn't as good as other reviews led me to believe. Maybe I was feeling generous but for a teen horror flick it made a good enough mark on me and had enough high points to get the thumbs up.
link directly to this review at https://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=4629&reviewer=293
originally posted: 05/14/02 22:34:23
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USA
05-Oct-2001 (R)
UK
N/A
Australia
25-Jul-2002
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