Death Proof

I saw the DVD version of "Death Proof" (2007), the one that's 1 hour 55 minutes long, and I found it a perfectly nice movie: an homage to a handful of action films of the 60's and 70's. It's filled with ontological details: little things that refer to the piece of film running through the projector, and I found it all funny and not intrusive at all.



It's a period piece, and here's a filmmaker who really wants to get all the details right, just like those fellows who do those awful Jane Austin movies.



I had forgotten how compelling real stunts are, and this movie goes out of its way to remind you, or, if you're young, to show you something you've never seen before (shades of Lumiere).



The final chase sequence involves a young woman holding onto the hood of a car and a deranged stranger who keeps crashing his car into hers in an effort to kill her. Why doesn't her friend, driving the car, simply slow down and stop so she can jump off to safety? Well, the movie has established the fact that no one here is very bright. So the chase is one extended stunt: she really is on that car hood and that car really is moving and I don't care how fast, because the whole thing feels dangerous. The blue screen comparison is the scene in "Minority Report" (2002) with Tom Cruise jumping from moving car to moving car. It probably cost ten times more to make that scene. Sorry, Quentin's girl on the hood version is much more visceral and much, much better. You knew you were watching something your mother would not want you to do. And it's a "B" movie thing: the Bond films always have great stunts, but Bond never dies. Here, we've already seen this guy kill four women with his car, so this woman definitely felt imperiled.


And isn't this plot line familiar? A heroine uses knowledge from the movie business to kill the bad guy at the end. Here, the brunette behind the wheel is a fearless movie stunt driver who uses her car, her gun and finally her heel to finish off the bad guy. In Quentin's very next film, the heroine uses flammable reels of 35mm film to send Hitler to Hell. And it was the "B" movie that was the plausible one.