Joy Ride
Christine with a big Mack truck meets Fast and Furious. Not as good as Breakdown or Seven, it doesn’t even try.
You know the drill, a city boy has the hots for some girl, so instead of flying home, he sells the ticket, buys a car, and drives all the way from California to the East Coast, picking her up in some podunk university town.
As he’s in the Salt Lake City area, he bails his brother out, after he is arrested (again) for public drunkenness. While our protagonist is as straight laced as it gets, his brother is the opposite, a loud mouth moron. As soon as he susses our protagonist is gunning for some girl, he asks him point blank “Are you fucking her?”.
The brother’s influence is taken to the limit when they install some CB radio and prank “call” some trucker, leading him to declare his love for Candy Cane in a public channel, and telling the Romeo his Juliet was in some motel room. This prank is deserved, since the victim is a racist POS. However, that dude is forced to eat the kerb, American History X-style, but offscreen, since they don’t have the budget or the balls to film it.
After leading a man to near death over some pranks, they wise up, but the prank-ee becomes the prank-er. Pranking the prankers. They are extremely spooked, his car banged up, but the daemonic truck stops after they apologise. This doesn’t make our protagonist ditch his brother, no siree. They are still tight.
They then pick up the girl, who appears before in full Top Secret! fashion, with the flashing boobs. Seriously, all her scenes were filmed after a lot of icing of nipples, and without any bra whatsoever. There’s even time to meet her roommate, another bombshell girl on a BMW Z3, she will be unimportant in the future.
The trio gets shitfaced, and the idiot brother makes a pass at her in a most foul betrayal. She doesn’t brush him off like the idiot Casanova, maybe the protagonist being considered a kind of big brother is real, he’s in the friendzone.
Doesn’t matter, because as they are curing their hangover, the kidnapper threatens them, which makes them run away into a cornfield, flail around for a bit, and let the girl be snatched. Now it’s official, they both have the right motivation to murder some trucker. But as city boys, the trucker only needs to straddle a ditch, it goes over any terrain.
Once they get back in the car again, she’s gone, and the car is on fire. They steal another one car so they car reach Bates Motel or whatever, where John Doe wrapped the girl in shrink wrap and set a shotgun to blow her brains out (not sexually, sadly). Eventually everything is solved in the end!
I can see why Paul Walker would spend time with Arnon Milchan, but Leelee Sobieski was filming Eyes Wide Shut a couple years before, and now, it’s all obscure boring-ass crap. For JJ Abrams this the usual crap he delivers.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.