Subject: REVIEW: TANK GIRL

From: [email-masked] (Scott Renshaw)
Date: Tue, 11 Apr 1995 13:51:08 GMT

TANK GIRL
		       A film review by Scott Renshaw
			Copyright 1995 Scott Renshaw

Starring:  Lori Petty, Naomi Watts, Malcolm McDowell, Ice-T, Stacy
Linn Rawsower.
Screenplay:  Tedi Sarafian.
Director:  Rachel Talalay.

     TANK GIRL is a movie made for the "you just don't get it"
crowd.  There is a segment of the movie-going audience, mostly young
and mostly male, whhich takes a certain contrarian pride i
championing oddball genre flicks which are generally met with
critical disdain or indifference.  These are the movies which come
to be known as "cult" favorites, and are treated as something of a
barometer of hipness.  This is what TANK GIRL is almost certain to
be, and I'll bet that the filmmakers are quite aware of it.  Part
ROAD WARRIOR, part ADVENTURES OF BUCKAROO BANZAI and part NATURAL
BORN KILLERS, TANK GIRL is sometimes quirky and fun, but just as
often merely loud and sloppy.

     In 2033, water is the most precious of resources after a comet
causes a global drought.  Most of that water is controlled by the
fascistic Water & Power Company, headed by the evil Kesslee (Malcolm
McDowell).  However, scattered bands of rebels try to live without
the W & P's control, one of which includes the feisty Rebecca Buck
(Lori Petty).  When the group's base is raided, Rebecca becomes
slave labor, and befriends a W & P mechanic and pilot called Jet
(Naomi Watts).  They manage to escape in W & P vehicles, but
Rebecca's young friend Sam (Stacy Linn Rawsower) is still a
prisoner.  With the assistance of the mutant Rippers, Rebecca--now
Tank Girl--and Jet attempt to save Sam and shut down the W & P.

     I'll give this to director Rachel Talalay--she seems to know
exactly what it is she wants to do with TANK GIRL.  It is a
hyper-kinetic piece of work that never seems to be taking itself at
all seriously, from the comic book page stills that introduce several
scenes to the goofy and diverse personalities of the supposedly
ferocious Rippers (genetically altered human-kangaroo hybrids,
designed by special effects make-up whiz Stan Winston).  There is
Malcolm McDowell, still resplendent in his spiky Sting-at-50 hairdo
from STAR TREK: GENERATIONS, playing a much livelier version of the
same megalomaniac.  He also gets to play with TANK GIRL's niftiest
gadget, a device which sucks all the water out of a human body.  And
of course, there is the bizarre production number in which Tank Girl
leads a group of futuristic exotic dancers in a production number to
Cole Porter's "Let's Do It."  There is one thing of which you can't
accuse TANK GIRL, and that is being conventional.

     What it can be accused of is not being nearly as clever as it
is self-consciously different.  Tedi Sarafian (sister of TERMINAL
VELOCITY director Deran Serafian) has provided Lori Petty with a lot
of one-liners, but none of them have any kick; in fact, I can't
recall a single piece of dialogue from the entire film.  Petty is a
great cast as the tough and unflappable Tank Girl, but she has to
carry far too much of the film with her cocky demeanor, because her
supporting cast (excluding McDowell, whose part is really fairly
small) is unimpressive.  The film also flounders a bit when it makes
token efforts to flesh out the characters, like giving Rebecca a
boyfriend she watches die at the hands of the W & P or her mother
hen relationship with Sam.  TANK GIRL, both the character and the
film, have attitude to spare, but often little else.

     Perhaps as much as anything, though, I was distracted by James
R. Symons trigger-happy editing which, combined with a soundtrack
compiled by Hole's Courtney Love-Cobain, makes TANK GIRL feel like a
feature length version of MTV's "Alternative Nation."  Entire
sequences are composed of snippets of Petty posing and doing cute
little things, apparently aware of the camera.  The battle sequences
are a real weak link, particularly one in which two separate battles
are cross-cut ineffectively.  Meanwhile, the made-for-playlists
soundtrack blasts out riff after riff from Devo, L7, Paul
Westerberg and other college radio darlings.  It was after about the
tenth song, sometime before the headache started to set in, that I
began to feel that TANK GIRL was one of those movies that had been
marketed, not made.  I wanted to like TANK GIRL, but I kept feeling
that the filmmakers kept daring me not to like it, daring me to be
un-hip.

     Guilty as charged.

     On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 Rippers:  4.

--
Scott Renshaw
Stanford University
Office of the General Counsel