DeathProof

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Damn you, Tarantino. Damn you all to hell! You submit to the studio, re-cutting and re-packaging your double bill for the UK market, jamming in a big stack of absolutely unnecessary, interminable dialogue. You add bad cuts and scratches and colour switching to make it look authentically grindhouse but which just get bloody annoying, then forget about them halfway through. You get me to the point where I can just about see the point of all those detractors I’ve defended you against, the ones who accuse you of crossign the line from Influence to Plagiarism, of trying too, too hard to claim your black culture cred, of rampant egotism, of making films that you enjoy more than anybody else ever could.

Then you go and spoil it all by finishing with one of the best car chases I’ve ever seen. And I know i’m going to start defending you all over again.

The whole thing started to pick up as soon as Kurt Russell sauntered in. Looking less like Burt Reynolds than the script would have you believe and more like Morrissey’s hard living uncle, he acts pretty much everyone off the screen, making me wonder if the reason why the dialogue had seemed so interminable was down to it not being delivered with any kind of style. Sydney “Jungle Julia” Poitier may have the legs and the sass but the dialogue seems to just fall out of her mouth, lacking the punch and acid that Russell gets out of his. “Stuntman Mike” just charms the birds out of the treats but every now and then, you feel him twitch. Just the wrong word, or the wrong tone and you get a sense of What Lies Beneath.

And for the record it’s “Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Titch”. That’s MICK not MITCH. I’m just saying.

The Lap-dance scene was apparently omitted from the US release. Speaking as a red-blooded filthy-minded heterosexual pervert, that’s a god-damned shame. They could easily have ditched some of the meandering subplots about friends who didn’t turn up and making out with “boys”.

Without spoiling anything, the first half of the film comes to a crunchin’ finale. To give you an idea of how much things had been dragging up until this point, I genuinely thought that was It. Thank God I didn’t leave. Once we get out of the bloody diner and past yet more “he said she said” dialogue, suddenly, the film feels like it’s in gear. Zoe Bell is an absolute revelation. Annoyingly, I can’t say too much without spoiling it but trust me – the car chase and everything around it is/are incredible.

Not a film that will change your life but might make you want to invest in a 1970 Dodge Challenger.

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