Redline
There is no point in trying
to look at Redline critically. It's a complete waste of time. Redline thumbs
its nose at artistic film conventions. The movie is a piece of
turn-your-mind-off filmmaking. It's all about the fast and the
superficial. Either you'll like it or not. Deal with it.
The guys of Redline are super rich,
selfish and
generally vain and stupid.
The machines are hard,
fast, tight and stunning works of art and that's just the girls.
Wait until you get a load
of the cars.
Redline is a guy's
super-charged sports-car fantasy revved up to 200 MPH.
It's a movie for every guy
who has ever seen a Lamborghini or a Ferrari and thought, "Wow, what would
it be like to get behind the wheel of that?" It fulfills the need (or
at least curiosity) of people who crave cars which cost significantly more
than most people's homes.
Redline is centered
around a supposedly burgeoning sub-culture of high-performance street racers
where a group of guys with too much time on their hands and money in their
accounts race their million dollar sports cars through crowded city streets
or tracks.
I say supposedly because
there seem to be only four of these tycoons at each race a movie producer
(Tim Matheson), a rap impresario (Eddie Griffin), some Japanese businessman
who gets no actual lines but mimes emoting every time he loses and an
obviously unhinged organized crime-type (Angus MacFadyen).
Dragged into the world is
Natasha, a stunningly beautiful singer and high-end car mechanic.
Turns out she is also a kick-ass driver, learning at the feet of her racer
dad before watching him die in a fiery crash. Because of this
experience she has given up driving professionally, however you know it's
not going to be that hard to get her back behind the wheel.
Natasha is played by Nadia
Bjorlin, formerly of the soap Days of Our Lives, and she does fine
with what little she is given to do. Still, I'd like to see what she
could do with a less hackneyed script.
If you liked The Fast
and the Furious, you'll probably enjoy Redline. In fact,
they are essentially the same movie, only Redline has a hot woman in
an unending series of cleavage-baring outfits as the lead. The plot is
beyond stupid and the dialogue often sputters in ways that the fine-tuned
machines the characters are driving never would. (i.e. "If you're
going to do this, don't do it for the money. Don't do it for us.
Do it because it's what you were born to do.")
However, considering little
things like plot and character development is missing the point. Well,
perhaps I'm letting the filmmakers off the hook a bit, a film like
Redline could potentially be done with those filmmaking techniques as
concerns, and it would be a much better movie for it.
The thing is though, they
deliver the goods that their target audience requires; gorgeous fast cars,
gorgeous fast women, high speed races, fights, lots of money, a little dumb
humor and a minimum of deep thought.
I'll never lie to you and
say that Redline is a good film. Far from it. However it
essentially achieves what it sets out to do.
Stupid fun, perhaps.
But you can't deny that Redline is fun.
Jay
S. Jacobs
Copyright ©2007 PopEntertainment.com. All rights reserved.
Posted: August 18, 2007.
