Rubber (2010)

A car tire named Robert mysterious awakens in the California desert, and with newly discovered psychokinetic powers wreaks havoc on a small town. An incompetent police force tries to track him down and destroy him, but the death toll continues to climb.

Why does a mute tire gain consciousness, and why further does he decide he likes the taste of destruction? The film will tell you there's no reason. It will, in fact, tell you that what you are watching has no reason at all and that it isn't particularly good. I would agree with that and go further to say that it isn't any good at all.

In a way I find the prospect of a reasonless film intriguing. As one character makes very clear, there are all sorts of things in movies which have no purpose at all and are simply there in order to make the movie more interesting. What I do no approve of, though, is being talked down to as though I weren't smart enough to figure out that that is what the filmmakers were trying to do all along. We are literally told by a man playing a police officer that the film we will be watching is without reason, and to my understanding that means it's pointless.

If, on the other hand, it had not said anything and had simply let us watch a B-film monster spoof only at the end to realize that director Quentin Dupieux had played an elaborate joke on the audience by creating a film entirely in homage to this concept, then I might have a lot of respect for this little indie film. Instead it decided to patronize its audience and then give us an ugly little story anyway.

I quite like Robert. Watching him discover his existence and his enjoyment at blowing up birds, rabbits and peoples' heads is actually endearing in a morbid way, and if he weren't killing things I might draw something of a parallel between him and Wall-E. The basic story isn't so awful, after all it's been done hundreds of times before. Everyone likes a good, cheesy monster movie, even one where the director tries too hard.

Where things go horribly wrong is a very confusing subplot where this entire story is a movie being played out for a live audience. They sit in the desert with binoculars commenting on all of the things that the real audience should be figuring out for themselves. It goes further into what I'm guessing was supposed to be some poorly thought out conspiracy or something--I really have no idea--but that is the basic gist of it. We sit there essentially watching ourselves, hearing our own thoughts told to us by bad actors and I began to realize it's because Dupieux didn't have enough ideas to make a feature-length film with any substance.

Had this been a 30 minute movie entirely about Robert's story without the stupid gimmicks and bad in-jokes it might have been an interesting attack on the audience and especially other filmmakers. As it happens, it was a dull, exhausting exercise on my patience that frankly made me more angry than inspired by their over-wrought artiness. I've wanted to see this film for a long time and it was one of the biggest disappointments I've had in recent memory.

0/4