Film review: Rubber (2010)

Continuing the run of cult movies, this arrived in the mail yesterday, I'm guessing from Matthew (as it reflects his sensibilities) and I remember being curious when it came out, so we sat down to watch it.  Verdict: something of a missed opportunity.  The skeleton of the movie is a killer (used) tire/tyre, which comes to life in the desert and, after taking a while to master rolling under its own steam, quickly discovers the joy of mayhem.  It starts slowly by crushing a plastic water bottle, and then a can, and a scorpion, but then finds that it is unable to crush a glass beer bottle.

Undaunted, it discovers another power: apparent telekinesis (that is, it vibrates increasingly violently), which, Scanners style, allows it to cause things (later, predominantly human heads) to explode.  After the bottle, its next victim is a rabbit, and then a crow...  In fact, that is one beef I have: this film is not imaginative enough as a horror film.  There's a repetitivity to the whole "making things explode" thing.  But the film seems to think you'll ignore that, because the horror film is encased within a fourth-wall-breaking, "it's all just pretend - or is it?" framework.  This begins before we ever encounter the tire, with a policeman giving a speech to the camera about how all great (or at least, successful) movies have a key element of "no reason": "Why is the alien in ET brown?  No reason!  Why do the couple in Love Story fall madly in love?  No reason!"  This justifies there being no motivation or explanation for the events we are about to watch.  Nice out, huh?  This speech is delivered to a crowd standing out in the desert who are then all presented with binoculars

by a strange skinny man in a white shirt who instructs them to look in a particular direction, whereupon they witness the tire's animation.  We keep coming back to these spectators, who have to sleep out in the desert and get increasingly hungry (how did they get there?  Why did they come?  Why didn't they bring food?  Why don't they just start walking?  NO REASON.) until the skinny man, on instructions from someone he calls "master" kills and cooks a turkey for them, which they descend on en masse and devour.  And it soon transpires that it was poisoned, and they all die.  This comes as a relief to the fourth-wall-busting cop, who, when a timer goes off informing him that the poison will have acted, tells his bemused comrades (who are investigating the tire's first human kill, a maid in an old motel) that they can stop acting and go home.  They didn't think they were acting, and the corpse is real.  But he insists, and has one of them shoot him twice, which, while it seems to make him bleed profusely, does not seem to affect him.

However, the skinny man informs him that one of the spectators did not eat the poisoned turkey, so the show must go on.  Meanwhile the tire, who appears to have a bit of a crush on a French woman driving a red Golf GTI convertible (after failing to make her its first kill) and imperiously ignores the son of the motel owner who is the first person to work out that it is the killer, and wants to communicate with it, rolls off and encounters a junk yard where piles of tires are being burnt.

This MAKES IT MAD, and we cut to three days later, where it has laid waste to an entire small town, leaving headless corpses littered everywhere.  MEANWHILE, the skinny man brings an entire cordon bleu meal to the stubborn remaining spectator (an army vet in a wheelchair), but when he refuses to eat it, eats it himself, apparently forgetting it is poisoned, and dies horribly (having recounted a tale of sibling violence that removes any pity one might have had for him).  Will the tire be stopped?  Well, certainly not by the cop's stupid plan of wiring a dummy with a dynamite and piping insulting words from the French woman over a radio attached to it, in the hope the tire will blow it up.

But maybe a shotgun will work?
All in all, a bit tiresome (and no, the pun wasn't planned when that adjective occurred to me).  Either do a horror film that works or go full art film.  But this is a poor example of either.  (Although this guy seems to disagree - although he might be being sarcastic.)  (Sidenote: it also continues a strange trend of being set in some indeterminate time, perhaps the eighties, currently beloved of all pop-culture producers (that certainly fits with the cars and the cathode-ray TVs with aerobics on them), but that seems to be just a way of avoiding having cellphones involved.  Cellphones, as has often been noted, destroy so many lazy plot devices that very few film makers seem to know how to incorporate them (off the top of my head I can only think of Zootopia as a successful example).  There's also the French director's clear love of Americana, especially the old motel with the huge beautiful 50's style sign, when in fact reality would've had an ugly Motel 6.)

In its favor, I will say that the cop and in particular the skinny man (Jack Plotnick - even the actors have fake-sounding names!) perform their roles with more commitment than they deserve (although the French woman, who has to endure an entirely gratuitous (you know - for NO REASON) naked shower scene, which involves the spectators offering their opinions of her anatomy, seems to be phoning it in).  And they do manage to get the tire to exude some menace, and for us to believe that it really does have telekinesis, largely by camera angles conveying its point of view.  And how they get the tire to roll under its own steam is a mystery of movie magic.  But in conclusion, despite what the tagline on the poster says, there has to be a better "killer tyre movie" waiting to be seen.  (Did make me want to visit the desert again, though - it was beautifully shot.)