Death Proof

Directed by Quentin Tarantino; starring Kurt Russell, Rosario Dawson, Vanessa Ferlito, Jordan Ladd

  1. Death Proof
  2. Production year: 2007
  3. Countries: France, UK, USA
  4. Cert (UK): 18
  5. Runtime: 87 mins
  6. Directors: Quentin Tarantino
  7. Cast: Jordan Ladd, Kurt Russell, Rosario Dawson, Rose McGowan, Vanessa Ferlito
  8. More on this film

Thirty years ago, Stanley Donen and Larry Gelbart made the bright little comedy Movie Movie, a pastiche double bill of Thirties Warner Brothers B-feature pictures, one a black-and-white boxing flick, the other a backstage musical in colour, using the same cast and refashioned sets for both and filling the gap between them with a trailer for a cut-price flying epic. Quentin Tarantino had a similar idea (some would say the same idea) and got together with Robert Rodriguez to make Grindhouse, a double bill of exploitation flicks of the sort shown in rural drive-ins and urban fleapits from the Fifties to the Eighties. After a major box-office failure in the States, the two are being released separately abroad, a plan that makes little sense, as proved by Tarantino's half of the diptych, Death Proof.

With deliberately bad lighting, poor colour, overacting and a distressed print to suggest too many journeys through faulty projectors, Death Proof is a tedious, meaninglessly anachronistic project. In the first half (in which Tarantino appears as a bartender), a party of girls in Austin, Texas, talks dirty for 40 minutes and are then deliberately killed in a spectacular car accident by a psychotic serial killer (Kurt Russell) who calls himself Stuntman Mike.

In the second half, set 14 months later in Lebanon, Tennessee, a party of girls talks dirty for 40 minutes and then takes violent revenge on Stuntman Mike in a spectacularly destructive car chase. Tarantino clearly suffers from what is known as the George V Higgins syndrome. Higgins began his career with the excellent crime novel The Friends of Eddie Coyle, but after being praised for his marvellous dialogue gradually lost interest in narrative drive and filled his books with page after page of self-indulgent speech.

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