fine whine

So today is the eleventh of September, a date to which has been given great significance here in America. If not for the recent destruction of New Orleans I'm sure there would have been more attention given to the annual rending and gnashing and whatnot.

Well, I'm not interested in gnashing nor rending. I'm aware of what happened in 2001, and it was indeed a tragedy, and I'm aware of what happened two weeks ago, and that too is a tragedy, but having an opinion of the events is about the extent to which I am involved with either, and that's about it.

So let's talk about escapist cinema. Tonight I finally saw Highwaymen*. The movie is as bleak and sparse as the highway that sometimes sets its stage. All of the dialogue is treated as though capital "I" Important, with some of the more obvious foreshadowing clichés.

Readers not interested in plot spoilers should skip a ways down, to the part after I mention how there's this guy killing people in an old El Dorado and there's this other guy who chases him in a Barracuda, but somebody else shoots the murderer at the end.

So there's this guy killing people with Cadillacs. The opening of the movie is an artfully shot (by which I mean "gratuitous use of slow motion and fast cuts mixed with over/undersaturation") and introduces us to Rennie Cray, yet another version of the unshaven, sullen-but-determined character that Jim Caviezel seems to play most of the time. He watches his wife (and a bag of citrus fruit) run down by a speeding, swerving maniac in a Cadillac. Fast forward five years and suddenly we're beset by angelic voices. Is this the score? Are we hearing the chorus because something significant or action-packed is happening? Alas, we are merely hearing some random choir practicing.

They practice on the stage in "Orchestra Hall". The city is never named, nor the highway, and so forth. It's obvious that the movie was shot in Canada well before the credits confirm that fact. The camera follows Molly (Rhona Mitra) out to the front of the Hall, where after a brief conversation with "Boone" (sorry, but the name just sounded silly when she said it) she hops in an old Mazda with her friend Alex (Andrea Roth). As the plucky little hatchback pulls away and eventually into a tunnel the Ontario license plates are visible. Oops. They'd been chased by a speeding and oddly menacing El Dorado and, already spooked, aren't ready for what scares await them ahead.

This town has a tunnel, and our ladies find it to be a scene of confusion and carnage before long, with upturned trucks and a spooked horse inside. One driver is obviously very hurt, and Alex runs out to get some help. Which, we all know, is a major movie mistake: never leave the main character alone and go for help (fittingly she's wearing a red shirt). She is hit by that menacingly "winking" Caddy (one set of headlights is not lit, though later the bulbs are in fact missing. I guess the continuity guy wasn't watching the car that closely) and dies a bloody death, but not before getting her friend Molly close enough to the car for the door to swing open and her snapshot taken with a bright flash. Somebody shows up, she escapes, and the next morning the cops come.

We meet Will Macklin (a familiar Freddie Faison), a state traffic investigator (for a state never named) who, surprisingly enough, isn't nearing retirement. He of course lives through the whole picture.

Actually, come to think of it, there aren't many deaths in the film. The opening titles use accident photos as a background and many are quite graphic and gory, but only six people, by my count, died during the proceedings; one off-screen (presumably) and another two or three times over in various flashbacks.

At its core it's a chase movie, a revenge thriller that puts the pedal to the metal and leaves it there the whole time. More or less, that's it. Back to the movie. Will finds Molly at the scene, Rennie finds her sleeping in the hospital, and Molly meets Will at his office, where it is revealed by some convoluted exposition that her family was killed in another accident. Well, that just sucks.

Will makes sure to mention that he doesn't carry a gun nor has he shot anybody. Idle chitchat, or foreshadowing? Only time will tell.

Molly is next shown as the only person wearing a brightly colored outfit amongst accident survivors in a sort of therapy session. The leader begins with "Here in America..." and I missed the rest as I laughed, having already seen the Ontario plates and guessed where "here" really was. Next we find Rennie and Molly engaged in some harmless banter in the hallway, and then some stronger words and intimidation that bring Molly to the point of agreeing to meet Rennie for a ride after choir practice, but as he waits for her then she is helped into an aging Saab by the aforementioned Boone, and the two drive off. Rennie is left to have a brief Adam-69 (two cars, facing opposite directions so the drivers can talk... it's fake cop lingo) with Will who is inexplicably also at Molly's practice, despite being a pretty sorry baritone. Rennie speeds off in his 1968 Plymouth Barracuda and Will can hardly keep up with his X-files surplus Ford Crown Victoria. Rennie gets away, and we cut back to Boone and Molly just before they are catapulted sky-high by a feat of leverage few square-fendered road yachts could hope to match in the real world. The sorry Saab soars and once it comes to rest Molly is shocked to find not only that Boone is likely beyond help, but that the madman has attached a tow chain, and she is soon being dragged at great speed in the upside-down Swedish coupe.

This sequence is quite cool looking, especially when Rennie appears, the knight in shining steel. He bashes off his door, and after some jockeying for position grabs her from the (now flaming) car. Immediate danger averted, he spirits her off to a convenient junkyard, where he will reveal to her his dark past (and thus his drive for vengeance), patch up her wounds, convince her to help him catch the guy, and find a new door for his car. Before that, though, we are treated to a ("Roger"-free, oddly) CB conversation, with closeups of an LED bar grafted onto an old CB radio to give some sort of visual effect to the scene.

Why they replaced the needle gauge that usually is there is beyond me, other than to punch up the visuals. Over ninety percent of the viewers wouldn't notice, and those who did probably wouldn't care. I'm not entirely certain that I care.

So some more stuff happens. In the sensitive moments in the junkyard office we learn that Molly "can't drive" because of the accident that killed her family.

Any time you hear an "I can't" or "I've never" or "I won't" or "I don't" in these movies it seems that the speaker "can" or "will" do what needs to be done, and this one is no different. It's a cliché, but apparently it works because this was the second movie in as many years to use that idea (the other was the dreadful remake of Taxi with Queen Latifah and Jimmy Fallon).

In that sequence we also learn that Rennie didn't just watch his wife get hit. He hopped into his Mercedes and chased down the killer Caddy in another artfully action-packed and effects-laden chase culminating in him t-boning the killer, totaling both cars and our antagonist. Rennie spent three years in prison and Fargo (somewhere along the line we learned his name) got 18 months in the hospital and re-hab being built into the near-cyborg that now roams the roads.

All of this of course builds to the tense final confrontation, but not until after Rennie sways officer Will to join him on his vigilante quest. Near the end he (and the camera) looks up to reveal an engine hoist or something else cross-shaped, and one can but wonder if he has any Christ-figure parallels in this movie as well.

Jesus always struck me as a Mopar fan, you know.

I really enjoyed watching Highwaymen. It's silly, and high-concept, and implausible, but it takes everything at face value and runs with it full throttle. Sure, director Harmon and his cast probably are capable of much, much more, but for what it is, it does well enough. Car chase fans and cheesy thriller buffs alike should give this a watch, if for no other reason to see something of a new take on age-old conventions.

* When first I saw the trailer for this, I thought it was a joke. I can't now recall the DVD that had the trailer for this, but it was a spoof or at least a comedy, and it didn't seem out of place on the disc to have absurd trailers for a fake film or two. This one just seemed so unreal, so contrived that it couldn't be real: In a world gone mad, two men speed around in 70s muscle cars, linked by killings and one woman who might just be the key to bringing the murderous streak to an end.

Well, it turned out that the film did in fact exist, and moreover to be available from my library. I reserved it, and, well, you can figure out the rest. Seeing as it was, in fact, really a movie, it has an AMG synopsis fraught with, well, one error. Matthew Tobey writes:

The culprit, it seems, had his heart broken by a woman long ago and now copes with his grief by hunting down and killing random women, using his green 1972 Cadillac El Dorado as his weapon.

As Caviezel's character explains, the homicidal maniac was the son of an insurance claims investigator who had been exposed at early age to gruesome accident photos. Growing up he transitioned from collecting the gory sights to staging them himself. The reason he only kills women is never explained. Likewise the reason he apparently always drives Cadillacs, as seen near the end in one or two shots of the dead cars in front of his motel. Some things, I guess, we were just not meant to know**.

** And some things aren't known by other people too. The subtitle authors for the DVD apparently weren't aware of what a Hemi was, nor did they have the script to work from, as Rennie's 'Cuda is described as "heavy" and not "Hemi" for the exceptionally large and powerful hemispherical-headed engine. "Heavy" indeed.