TANK GIRL
A film review by David Petry
Copyright 1995 David Petry
When I left the theater, I was shaking my head back and forth--and grinning from ear to ear. TANK GIRL is the goofiest movie I have ever seen, and I loved it.
In the first scene, we see Tank Girl (Lori Petty) riding some kind of ox out in the desert. Both the ox and Tank Girl are wearing totally outlandish outfits, with gas masks and goggles for starters, and we hear Lori Petty in her cute childish voice introducing us to the story.
It's the year 2030, and a comet has struck the earth and thereby upsetting the weather patterns so that it hasn't rained in many years. Of course, this makes water extremely valuable, and a ruthless corporation called the Department of Water and Power is working to establish a monopoly on what little water is available.
Tank Girl is a one of a group of renegades resisting the Department. Along the way, she gets kidnapped and enslaved, but then escapes along with another slave Jet Girl (Naomi Watts) and teams up with the Rippers--half man, half kangaroo genetically engineered super soldiers--to ultimately defeat the Department and its deliciously evil leader (Malcolm McDowell).
But what's important in this movie is not where they get to, but how they get there. They get there in style.
To get a feel for the style they go in, Tank Girl wears HEAVY METAL clothes, has a shaved head, pierced body parts (at least I think she did) and drives around in a tank that comes complete with lawn furniture! You've got to see it to believe it.
Adding to the general absurdity of this movie is the creative use of cartoons and special effects, wacky costumes and sets, and Tank Girl's incessant feminist wise-cracking. We get to see the kangaroo men hoping wildly all over the place, and we hear Tank Girl questioning men's adequacy.
At times the movie almost seems to have a strong man-hating message. The men (except perhaps the men who are half kangaroo) in the movie are caricatured as evil, power hungry louts who want only one thing from women. But the actresses do such a good job of not taking themselves (or anything else, for that matter) too seriously, that it can all be taken in stride.
It'd be easy to criticize this movie as being silly and senseless. And it is. But so what? It's good fun. I'd recommend that you take a chance on it.
Oh, a rating? I have no idea how to give this movie a rating on a scale of 1-10. This movie is from another dimension.
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