Heads roll on the highway

10 April 2012

John Dahl is just about the best director of films noirs there is these days. No one else seems to do these small-scale, large-thrill movies, set in Middle or Far West America, showing Fate - intense and capitalised - closing in inexorably on those who've brought it on themselves.

But, that said, the audience for such Low Culture packages seems to force compromise on Dahl once he's had his jollies setting up a suspense sequence the equal of Hitchcock's for indirect fear.

Roadkill - originally called Joyride, now retitled, perhaps in homage to the current British road-safety campaign - starts off on a beautiful rising curve of terror. Lewis, a nice college kid (Paul Walker), bails his bad brother, Fuller (Steve Zahn), out of jail for a misdemeanour; the two then set off across those endless wastelands filled with black-top highways, neon signs, cheap motels, rain storms, thundering trucks and sunset hills, to pick up the girlfriend for whom Paul's traded in his air ticket for company on the journey.

Halfway there, Fuller fools around with a CB radio, and both play a humiliating practical joke on an unseen trucker called Rusty Nail, inviting the grim-voiced stranger to a faux-romantic assignation ("bring pink champagne") in the motel room next to theirs. The guy keeps the date. Nothing in the film is more terrifying than the two cowering kids, ears glued to the wall, listening to the unseen violence that Rusty Nail metes out to the innocent occupant next door.

Then, with grim retribution, the trap is sprung on them. When Rusty Nail discovers they've duped him, his rage knows no speed limit. But that's where plausible horror-fiction ends and the omniscient, ubiquitous pursuit by a criminal mastermind begins - and costs the film its grip.

We've been that route before, too often, beginning with Spielberg's 1971 TV film Duel - a helpless little motorist with a juggernaut tanker on his tail. An episode like the disembodied Rusty Nail ordering both boys to walk, buck naked, into a gas-station diner so that they'll know what sexual humiliation means is quite amusing, but out of key: a fraternity house prank, perhaps, not a fear-driven ordeal. The pursuing rig carving furrows through a cornfield, a genetically modified switch on Spielberg's asphalt assault course, has its high moments; but the tension has been dissipated in a series of violent set-pieces which any competent director could mount with 24 stunt men.

Never mind (too much): Roadkill/Joyride is an enjoyable foot-on-the-metal thriller, if not up there with Dahl's Red Rock West or The Last Seduction. He's a man born out of his time: in the black-and-white 1940s or 1950s, he'd have been king of the noirs.

Roadkill
Cert: cert15

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