...a galvanizing amusement park ride that only occasionally steps over the bounds of common sense.
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I´m not sure what I expected going into "Joy Ride," the 2001 thriller from Fox. I´d heard only a little about it before watching it, and the title alone made me suspicious. I had a feeling it might be a combination of "Jeepers Creepers" and the old Steven Spielberg made-for-TV movie "Duel," and, in fact, I wasn´t far wrong. "Joy Ride" is, indeed, a combination of both those films. While being a little more farfetched than "Duel," the one about the guy being chased by a maniacal truck driver, it is everything that "Jeepers Creepers" could have been but wasn´t. "Joy Ride" is a galvanizing amusement park ride that only occasionally steps over the bounds of common sense. In an excellent disc transfer, with a decent collection of added features, the film makes a serious bid for one´s DVD dollars.
If there´s a moral to "Joy Ride," it´s not to play practical jokes. Two brothers, Lewis and Fuller Thomas (Paul Walker and Steve Zahn), the former a student at UC Berkeley, the latter just released from jail for disorderly conduct, are heading cross-country to pick up Lewis´s girlfriend in Colorado when Fuller gets the bright idea to play a trick on local truckers via their CB radio. He gets Lewis to pretend to be a girl (using a girl´s voice) and lure some poor, lonely trucker to an evening´s rendezvous. Sophomorically foolish, but it has deadly consequences. They find a trucker whose CB handle is "Rusty Nail" and get him to bring a bottle of pink champagne to a motel room next to theirs at midnight. They figure on a good laugh. No laugh. Instead, the outraged trucker tears the jaw off the guy in the next room and then comes after them! The rest of the film is a chase between the demented trucker and the brothers, who along the way pick up Lewis´s girlfriend, Venna (Leelee Sobieski).
OK, so there´s not much plot to get in the way of the action, as drive-in movie critic Joe Bob Briggs used to say. And it´s the action that counts. Although the story could have been overwrought and silly in the manner of a typical teen slasher flick, it´s turns out to be fairly exciting and suspenseful. From the moment a deputy announces about the victim, "Ripped his jaw...clean off," the viewer is in for one shudder after another. Of course, understand, it´s still a formula movie. Apparently, Hollywood has determined that the average audience for this type of genre is made up of sixteen to twenty-five-year-old males. Therefore, their early twenties is the age of the film´s two male and one female protagonists. Heaven help us should a studio deviate from the standard recipe.
So, I´m not saying "Joy Ride" is the second coming of "Citizen Kane" or another "Psycho." There´s plenty about the film that just doesn´t make sense, like how the trucker is so easily able to locate the boys in the first place, how he manages to track them all over the country without being spotted in a truck the size of Rhode Island, or why he becomes so murderously obsessed with them over a relatively trivial prank. Perhaps he was already on the edge of insanity when the joke pushed him over the brink. That the film makes any attempt at all in justifying the motives of the monster (and a monster is surely what the trucker becomes) is more than most such thrillers offer. At the very least, then, there´s a degree of plausibility to the story that makes it all the easier to suspend one´s disbelief.
The real action starts in the second half of the film when "Rusty Nail" has successfully tracked the heroes down and is exacting his rather harrowing revenge. It´s also here that every possible clichéd obstacle and disaster befall the heroes, from getting their car stuck in a ditch to running out of gas to running up dead-end roads in the middle of the night to the usual business of the car not starting when they desperately need it to. Then, inexplicably, the activity is interrupted while they pick up Venna, an interlude of such length I could have done without it. But it isn´t long before the chase is on again, with every face in the crowd a potential danger. Despite the stereotyped hurdles that beset the protagonists, the director, John Dahl, who cowrote the script, manages to inject the story with enough creative variations on the theme to keep the momentum strong and the pace lively. I especially liked that the deranged truck driver is never seen, only heard, in a creepy CB radio voice that in itself is guaranteed to send chills down the spine. If you remember, one of my objections to "Jeepers Creepers" was that once the monster was revealed in full, it spoiled the fun, the wonder, and the rest of the film was downhill. Not so in "Joy Ride," which maintains its mystery and suspense all the way to its genuinely nail-biting conclusion.
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[release]9723[/release]