Car Babes
I can't quite decide if the
guy who named this movie Car Babes despite the fact that
almost none of the significant roles are played by women is a marketing genius or incredibly cynical.
Probably a little of both.
After all, a lot of guys
scanning a video shelf and seeing lots of titles they've never heard of can
get confused. However, a certain type of viewer will see a title like
Car Babes and think, "I like cars. I like babes. Let's
check this out."
Of course it's a tiny bit
of a bait-and-switch. Oh, sure, there is a share of hot girls
sprinkled in to keep things interesting. But most of the people
looking for a raunchy romp will be surprised to find more of a workplace
comedy trying to be a low-brow spin on the Glengarry
Glen Ross small-time-salesmen formula. Then again, most people who are looking for a
movie called Car Babes will not even know what Glengarry Glen Ross
is.
The term babes here seems
to be more in the "Hey, I just jetted in from the coast, babe..." vernacular.
Or perhaps as in "babe in the woods" as Ford (played by grown-up Boy
Meets World star Ben Savage) has to learn the car sales biz from the
bottom. Well, not exactly the bottom, his father is the owner of the
lot, so he isn't quite as desperate or as guarded as most of the other
workers.
Car Babes can't
quite decide what it wants to be. It's trying to be both a comedy and
a drama and it doesn't quite connect on either level. Most of the
characters are too broad and cartoonish to be taken seriously when the plot
motors into important issues like alcoholism, big vs. small business and
unrequited love. Every time the film works hard to make a sober
point, there will be a fight or goofball quip or pratfall that lets all of
the air out of the tires.
As you can tell by his
character's name, Ford was born into the car biz. His father is one of
those obnoxious local used-car dealers who does his own cheesy commercials.
Ford is trying hard to find a job any job outside of the family
business. Finally, though, he is forced by circumstance to clip on a
name tag and learn the sales game.
Of course, it is just at
this moment that his dad is in the middle of the fight of his business life
with a slimy good-ol-boy trailer dealer. There is a spy in the
dealership, the salesmen feel the coming doom and turn on each other and dad
is losing the will to fight. So Ford has to step up big time to save
the company.
In the meantime, Ford
learns about responsibility and what is important in life even trading up
from a beautiful-but-shallow blonde girlfriend (probably a bit too beautiful
for him, honestly...) to a beautiful-caring-and-car-loving Hispanic one (but
again, probably a bit out of his league). The two girls circle around
him and in their own ways try to win him over, and then will turn on a dime
to be furious with him. And Ford, apparently not quite recognizing how
much out of his weight-class he is dating, is more than happy to allow that
anger to fester and to disappear from both of their lives for extended periods.
He never just says what he thinks, instead he jumps to conclusions and
sulks.
The screenplay can be a
little sloppy. When Ford breaks up with his one cute-but-shallow
girlfriend because she gets a job in a Hooters-esque restaurant called
Melonz, within a matter of weeks she is Miss October in the
restaurant's calendar which was the current month so it would have had to
have been from the last year! Then again, he is working as an used-car
salesman, does he really have that much wiggle room to judge her job as a
waitress/hostess?
So will Ford win the day,
save the family business and marry the hot Latina? Or will evil
conspicuous consumption RVs take over the world? You may have a guess,
but there's only one way to find
out for sure.
Jay S. Jacobs
Copyright ©2007 PopEntertainment.com. All rights reserved.
Posted: October 5, 2007.
