Quentin Tarantino is in a unique club: every movie he makes comes with an extraordinarily high bar of expectations. Since his first Oscar win for Pulp Fiction, audiences feverishly wait for his next violent, curse word-filled masterpiece. Audiences were no different in 2007. Having come off of Kill Bill volumes 1 & 2, expectations could not have been higher for Tarantino’s grindhouse flick Death Proof. With the hype surrounding his latest film set to come out next week, let’s look at Tarantino’s fifth film and why it stands as the worst film in his filmography.
Death Proof stars Zoe Bell, Rosario Dawson, and a slew of other talented women that are stalked by Kurt Russell’s character, Stuntman Mike. Mike claims to be a stunt driver for the movies and lures his victims into his “death-proof” car where he takes joy in killing his victims by crashing and destroying his car, each time leaving everyone dead at the scene of the accident. Mike has been playing this game for a while, that is until he meets his match when he comes across the wrong set of women.
Tarantino released this movie alongside Planet Terror, directed by Robert Rodriguez, as a “Grindhouse” double feature. A grindhouse movie is a sub-genre that is essentially an exploitation film, popularized in the 1970’s. These types of movies generally have bizarre plot points and contain explicit violence and sexual content. They are also known for being of really poor quality, having bad acting, negative scratches on the film, and clipped dialogue. This is certainly the most unique aspect of the movie, as it is covered with a bevy of negative scratches and terrible edits. It is also an interesting choice that Tarantino places this movie in modern day rather than the 70’s. The only indicator of this is one of the characters has a cell phone. But about halfway through the movie it’s almost as if Tarantino either got lazy or forgot that he was making a grindhouse movie. The 70’s aesthetic slowly disappears and becomes, well, a normal looking movie. Even accepting the “poor film making” as something that Tarantino was clearly going for, it felt largely inconsistent after the first half of the movie.
The movie’s strongest points are the plot and Kurt Russell’s character. The idea of a crazy stunt driver killing people with his death-proof car could not be a better premise for a fun movie, let alone a Tarantino movie. The first scene where we are introduced to Stuntman Mike is an extended sequence where he stalks and follows his victims into a bar. We see how he works his victims as he shows them his charm and flashes them his “cool” job. The moment he gets them into his car, he flips a switch and becomes a merciless and malicious killer. Russell is clearly having a lot of fun with the role and I loved his dialogue. I just wish we could explore his character more and see him in action for more than two scenes. The first car-crash-killing sequence is very well done and goes down as one of the most violent scenes in all of Tarantino’s movies, living up to the grindhouse reputation.
Unfortunately, the movie’s biggest problem is the fact that we don’t see enough of Stuntman Mike in action. Every time he is on screen I found myself engaged in him and the story. But the majority of the film takes place either inside a car or a restaurant where we sit with two different groups of women who talk about sex, life, and their relationship problems. Tarantino is certainly someone to trust with the job of keeping us entertained by merely watching people talk to each other on screen about nonsense, whether it’s about McDonald’s or restaurant tipping. He has a way of making otherwise everyday conversations reveal more about the characters and keep you engaged. His prose is consistently exposed through his characters, whether they take place during WWII, the Wild West, or modern day. That consistency just isn’t here.
Instead, I found myself consistently checking my watch and waiting for the next action sequence, which is unlike me during a Tarantino movie. It is difficult to become engaged with the characters and their conversations and I found myself bored and uninterested. It’s almost as if the movie didn’t know what to do with itself between the bar scene and action sequence that we get, which are both a really good time. The stunt work of strapping Zoe Bell to the front of a car while driving at high speeds with Stuntman Mike on their tail definitely fueled the stakes and the tension again. But unfortunately the movie chooses to steer further away from what was really working in its first half.
This may have been the right story for Tarantino to tackle but in the wrong genre. I think it’s difficult to put someone like Tarantino in a position where he has to essentially make a “bad movie” in order to fit the grindhouse aesthetic. But it’s difficult to distinguish between what Tarantino intentionally made poorly, aside from the physical aesthetics, and where he may have just had some genuine shortcomings in the storytelling. Even though this is supposed to be a “bad” movie, I find it hard to assume that Tarantino intentionally made an uninteresting and boring movie to fill the gaps between some excellent sequences within an intriguing premise. Maybe it was the Tarantino hype and expectations that ultimately led to my lackluster feelings towards the movie. But in the end, even Tarantino’s worst movie by his standards manages to be a good time anyway.
