REVIEW: "Rubber" (2010)

PIAR spends and evening having the mickey taken out of him and still isn't sure how he feels...

Marketed virally as a "so-bad-it's-good", B-movie flick, 2010 film "Rubber", by French director Quentin Dupieux, is far from what the trailer makes it out to be. Instead of a tribute to the genre's revival, brought about by the Rodriguez/Tarantino "Grindhouse" project, it is difficult to say whether "Rubber" is anything at all.

Ostensibly a film about a killer-tyre going on a killing spree in a desert town, "Rubber" both makes fun of and demands its audience's desire to search for meaning. The film opens with main character (if indeed he is a character) Lieutenent Chad giving an ironic speech about the amount of things that happen in life for "no reason." This immediately sets the jokey-tone the film takes towards applying reason and motives to a film about a killer wheel.

As such its difficult to comment at all on the events, characters and themes of "Rubber" without falling into this trap and being part of the joke of the whole movie. Perhaps this is the reason that the film met with such negative reception at Cannes when it was debuted? - movie critics are being made fun of for doing their job and trying to read "Rubber" as a text and they don't like this!

Yet it cannot be ignored that "Rubber" does have something to say on the topic of how we regard and encounter film. Another key block of characters in the film are the "the audience" who are watching the escapades of the tyre from their god-like vantage point. The different personalities within this group stand for different types of film audience. There are the "film nerds" who comment and joke throughout the film, the casual-viewers who get annoyed at these nerd interruptions and then, finally, there is the obsessive fan stalwartly refusing to let the film end until he is embroiled personally in it - (the fate of the genetleman in the wheelchair).

To an extent it is true that the film within the film ( the plot concerning the tyre murders) has no meaning or reason, yet it is untrue that the film proper ("Rubber" as a whole) does have something to say on the themes of film-making and audience perception. Well...either that or PIAR is just another victim of Dupiex...

In conclusion do not watch this if you want an evening of ironic or dumb B-movie schlock. But if you're willing to be challenged or mocked (or both) then there is plenty here to get confused or angry about...

3 strange, bicycle-wielding men out of 5