Dir. Quentin Dupieux (2010)
A sentient car tire decides to wreak havoc on a small town.
CAUTION: MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS.
The film opens with a sheriff’s deputy expounding upon the fact that lots of things happen in films for no reason, telling the audience that the movie was made to celebrate the fact that things happen for no reason. What follows is an hour and a half of the strangest movie you’ve ever seen in your life. A tire animates itself out of a dumb and discovers that it has “psychokinetic” powers when it is able to destroy a bottle with its mind. It then explodes a tin can, followed by a bunny. And then a bird. Why? FOR NO REASON! GET IT! All during this time, the tire is being watched by the “audience,” a group of people who were brough to the show and who were being addressed by the sheriff’s deputy from the beginning of the film.
Consumerist culture? Fuck if I know, I have no idea what this movie was trying to say.
Rubber may be the dumbest movie ever made. It’s not the worst movie: the production value is super high, it’s relatively funny at times, but it is, nonetheless, quite possibly the dumbest movie ever made. It’s also one of the slowest, as its more than 20 minutes into the film before someone is killed by the tire, and most of the runtime is spent with the tire rolling through various parts of town. It’s like a slasher movie told through the perspective of the killer, but the film follows the killer around through the entire runtime without focusing on the victims at all. Actually, that sounds way cooler than this movie is. I just… I don’t really know how to critique this film. I had heard about it for years and finally decided to watch it for you people. There have to be people out there who love this movie, and I read what was practically a dissertation from Penn State about how this was a “brilliant movie about the nature of film.” Like, yeah, I get that. I get that the audience is us, and they’re easily baited and that the movie within a movie only happens when the people making the movie tell it to happen, and that they do so simply because they want to and not for any other discernible reason. But like… that’s the point? This movie cost $500,000 to make. That’s a half a million dollars. It made approximately $100,000 during its entire run.
Actual picture of the theaters.
Look, I’m not a social justice warrior, and I’m not someone who is going to question what people do with their money, either (to which my rapidly growing physical media collection can attest), but like… do you have any idea how many homeless people you could’ve fed with 500k? Instead, director Quentin Dupieux manages to make the dumbest study on nihilism of all time. There’s nothing wrong with making a film with no reason attached, and there are plenty of films with bizarre subject matter and are in it purely for the “art.” The problem with this film is that it’s boring as all hell, it’s not funny, and there’s no actual entertainment value. I’m all for minimalism, in plot and otherwise, but as a movie for which no reason exists, at a certain point there exists no reason for watching.
Who this movie is for: Hipster nihilists, tire enthusiasts, and literally no one else
Bottom line: Save your time, this movie is an hour and a half of nothing but a tire running around killing people for no reason. Like, literally no reason, that’s the entire point of the movie. This isn’t art, it’s stupidity. This coming from a guy who loves bad movies. This isn’t even really a movie, it’s like a meta piece that only guys who smoke antique pipes and wear shirts for bands that no one has heard of can appreciate. Steer clear. If you’ve already seen it, I’m terrible sorry.
