HuffPost Review: <i>Rubber</i>

HuffPost Review:
This post was published on the now-closed HuffPost Contributor platform. Contributors control their own work and posted freely to our site. If you need to flag this entry as abusive, send us an email.

There's no reason to go on at much length about Rubber, a new film by Quentin Dupieux.

This is the kind of oddball entry that's popular at film festivals. It probably shouldn't have been more than a short but somehow was expanded into a feature. It's an exercise in meta- and all the other pseudo-intellectual, self-referential terms that critics toss around when a movie isn't actually about anything.

Rubber is a one-joke movie: A rubber tire rises from the sand in the desert and starts rolling toward the nearest town. Along the way, it discovers it has the ability to concentrate its powers, focus on a subject and make it explode. So it blows up animals and people's heads, like David Cronenberg did in Scanners 30 years ago. Tee-freakin'-hee.

This movie blows its cleverness wad in the first five minutes. Then, like the tire itself, it keeps on going, an ode to self-involved silliness and audience (and critical) gullibility.

The film starts with an actor (Stephen Spinella) dressed in a sheriff's uniform, addressing the camera and referencing a variety of films whose central premise was arbitrary: "No reason at all," he says, by way of introducing a film whose sole reason for being is - well, no reason at all.

Why does the tire come to life and develop destructive powers? No reason at all. Why is there an audience of people watching the tire's antics in the desert from a distance with binoculars? No reason at all.

Why is there a live turkey - oh, please, there's no reason at all to go on. And there's certainly no reason at all to see this film.

Popular in the Community

Close

What's Hot