Rubber – 2010

When a movie constantly breaks the fourth wall by talking about how terrible the movie is, is it excused from being terrible?

No. No it’s not. “Rubber” proves this.

Rubber is a movie about a tire that kills people.

A. TIRE. THAT. KILLS. PEOPLE.

Ugh.

One thing you should know about this movie is the plot is non-existent and there is absolutely no character development.  You are shown things and literally told to just deal with it.  None of the characters are particularly likable, save the tire.  Why do we like the tire?  Because he makes people explode. With his mind.

The movie starts off in a desert.  Real basic, real simple, desert with nothing happening.  This continues for roughly ten minutes before anything changes, at which point they start showing black Ikea chairs on a dirt road.  We start seeing more and more chairs, first only one, then two, then five, oh god there are ten chairs in a road now.  Who’s this?  A skinny white man with glasses and ten sets of binoculars.

At this point a car comes down the road and slowly knocks over every chair.

We are greeted by a Sheriff who rambles off a five minute monologue about how “most things in life happen for no reason.”  He then pours one out for his metaphorical homies.

The sheriff gets back in his car while the nerd starts passing out binoculars to a group of people that have been just off camera this whole time, apparently.  They start talking about “This sucks, I can’t see anything” and “Oh god this is so boring, why are we here?”  These people are spectators to the movie we are currently watching.  They don’t like the movie either, THAT SHOULD TELL YOU SOMETHING.

It takes a full twenty minutes for the tire to make an onscreen appearance.  The camera pans down to a dirty tire, half-buried in sand.  After another several minutes of filler, the tire sits up and starts awkwardly rolling around until he finds a water bottle.  He hesitates for a moment before running over the water bottle with a satisfying crunch.  He also runs over and kills a scorpion, which makes an even better sounding crunch.

Then, if you can believe it, something strange happens.  The Tire comes across a glass bottle, which he discovers he can’t run over.  He tries several times to no avail, so what does he do?  He backs up, gets pissed off, and uses his brain powers to explode the hell out of it. The tire decides he’s had enough excitement for one day and falls over, going to sleep.

The next morning, we are greeted by my two favorite scenes in the entire movie.

• The nerd wakes up the sleeping spectators by smacking the shit out of them with a briefcase.
• The Tire uses his explode powers to annihilate a rabbit.

If nothing else, this movie has good special effects and production value.  When the rabbit explodes, it leaves behind piles of meat, blood, and fur.  You really feel like, “Oh god, I just watched a rabbit die.”  It’s pretty great.

The tire continues for another couple minutes until he spots a woman driving down the road.  While the tire prepares to give this woman the head-exploding of a lifetime, he gets clipped by a guy in a truck.  This really pisses off the Tire, so he plans on revenge.

I want to pause a moment to reflect on what has happened so far. A tire is angry and wants to kill people for fun.  This is becoming physically painful to analyze.

The Tire continues down the road on a search for the woman, but instead, catches up to the trucker at a gas station and obliterates his skull into tiny, bite-size pieces.  He continues on killing random people on his quest for the woman with a convertible, eventually drawing the attention of the local police after a kid witnesses one of the murders.

At this point, our spectators are all pissed at how slow the movie is going, while impressed with the cool head explosions.  Nerd Guy shows up with a Turkey and literally throws it in the dirt near them and they just go at it like animals.  It is a very disturbing scene where 10 people just do a running dive into a turkey and tear bits off.

Well, luckily for them, it was poison and they all die.

Our Sheriff from the opening monologue gathers up all the other officers and a couple of the townsfolk and informs them, “OK everybody, good job. You can go home now, they’re dead.  I repeat, we poisoned all the spectators.  They are dead, you can go home.”  That’s right, the movie just killed off it’s spectators so it could end.  He is interrupted by the Nerd who whispers in his ear “One of the spectators didn’t eat.  We have to keep going.”  It should be noted the Sheriff looks very disappointed.  In fact, he’s not even sure of how to continue.  He pulls a note from his shirt pocket that reads, “Oh god, the kid was right, the killer is a tire.”  The look of disgust on the Sheriff’s face is priceless here.

Rejoining his officers, the Sheriff throws a tire from his car onto the ground and says, “This is what our killer looks like.  Any questions?”

“What brand of tire?”
“Probably brandless.”
“Is it worn?”
“Yes.”
“Is it black?”
ಠ_ಠ

After a three day killing spree, the police catch up to Tire, who is now watching Nascar in the home filled with newly exploded corpses.  They hatch a plot to kill the tire, by rigging explosives to a mannequin dressed like the woman from the convertible and taunting it.  “Come out here and kill me you rubber piece of shit.”

Suddenly, our heroes are interrupted by the last remaining spectator.

Spectator: “What are you guys doing?  This is retarded.  It makes no sense.”
Sheriff: “Well, we wouldn’t even be here if you had eaten the damn turkey!”
Spectator: “Fair enough.”

The explosives don’t work, and Sheriff gets pissed, grabs his shotgun, and just bum-rushes the Tire, shooting it multiple times point blank.  Satisfied with his handiwork, the Sheriff packs up and leaves. Suddenly, the camera pans to the backdoor of the house as a tricycle slowly wheels out onto the porch. “Wait!! Come back! It’s not over yet! He’s been reincarnated as a tricycle!!” shouts our lone spectator.

Mercifully, the Tricycle murders the spectator and heads out onto the road, gathering other tires for some kind of West Side Story style street gang fight.  The movie ends with a scene of a tricycle, followed by about a dozen tires in the middle of the street looking at the famous “Hollywood” sign.

Final Thoughts:

It’s a shame a movie with good production values and decent actors had such a horrible (non-existent) plot or characters we should care about.  Seriously, it’s like they were given a budget and gave %90 of it to the “Meat-Explosion Specialists”, which, by the way, would be an excellent career/band name.  The acting wasn’t bad and the explosions/special effects were well done.  But oh god did this movie move slow.  20 minutes before we even see the tire, another 20 before he kills a human.  Why was this movie 90 minutes long?  Why does God hate me?  I don’t know, but I’ll bet it’s automotive related.  I’ve done terrible things to a Suzuki.

BONUS:  I haven’t confirmed if it’s related to the movie or not, but my laptop did crash during this movie.  I’d like to think it tried to commit suicide.  Not today, my friend.