By RUSSELL BAILLIE
(Herald rating: * * * * )
We've been down this road before - past city limits and out into the Big American Nothing, the tumbleweed country where the towns exist only to refuel those just passing through.
But if the highway thriller Joy Ride runs through familiar territory
- it's pretty much using the same map as those movies which stretch from Spielberg's Duel to 1997's Breakdown - then it at least makes smart work of it.
It also manages to be a little cunning up front. By making its characters a college guy (Walker), his ne'er-do-well brother (Zahn), and the willowy girl (Sobieski) he has arranged to pick up from her Colorado university, it might lead you to think we're in dumb teen-slasher territory.
But Joy Ride is a much more mordantly funny and classier act than that. As he's shown on his previous Red Rock West and The Last Seduction, director John Dahl knows how to make the back of beyond seem twice as creepy as the big smoke. And he's got a sense of humour as black as the streetlamp-free night in which this movie spends so much time.
Like Duel, it's another case of don't-make-the-psycho-trucker-mad (whoops, too late). That's just what happens after Lewis sets out from the West Coast to pick up Venna (Sobieski).
However, along the way, he's diverted to rescue older brother Fuller (Zahn) from the drunk tank in Utah. Fuller thinks a second-hand CB radio ("it's like a prehistoric internet") would just be just the thing for some entertainment in Lewis' ancient gas- guzzler. Then the trouble begins ...
Like the best suspense flicks, it's what you don't see that is unnerving. One sequence, which has the brothers listening through the wall of a hotel room as a storm rages and strange sounds emanate from nextdoor, is unbearably tense for that reason.
Others are just out'n'out terrifying, even if they can have you scouring the memory banks for the derivations -even the last line from the never-seen menacing trucker suggests he's a fan of Taxi Driver.
It helps that Zahn is hilarious, Walker is a solid straight man and Sobieski is there to do quite a lot more than scream at appropriate moments, of which there are quite a few.
They make fine mice being chased by one nasty diesel-powered 18-wheeled cat.
Joy Ride might employ some cheap tricks along the way, but it's hard not to relish every bend on this highway to hell.
Cast: Paul Walker, Leelee Sobieski, Steve Zahn
Director: John Dahl
Rating: R16 (violence)
Running time: 97 mins
Screening: Village, Hoyts
By RUSSELL BAILLIE
(Herald rating: * * * * )
We've been down this road before - past city limits and out into the Big American Nothing, the tumbleweed country where the towns exist only to refuel those just passing through.
But if the highway thriller Joy Ride runs through familiar territory
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