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
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