Review of Tank Girl (1995) by Robert B — 28 Mar 2012

Tank Girl (Rachel Talalay, 1995).

Tank Girl was ahead of its time by a pretty wide margin-made long before the current "we'll-make-anything-that-was-ever-a-graphic-novel!" craze came into fashion, when if it wasn't a recognizable superhero you were up the creek. (And even that wasn't a guarantee of success, viz. the mid-nineties Batman flicks.) Needless to say, in benefit of hindsight, that is not always a problem. What IS a problem with this film specifically, however, was a couple of decisions that took what was already a vertical-market property and rammed it into a niche so narrow that to this day, the movie has a small (very small) core of fans surrounded by a mass of detractors that dwarfs it. Those decisions: Lori Petty and Rachel Talalay.

The latter first here: Talalay's resume, before she was attached to this huge-in-scope big-budget ($25 million per IMDB) sci-fi piece, included Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (doesn't it go without saying that was a turd?) and the godawful Ghost in the Machine, both basement-budget horror flicks. Whose brilliant idea involved letting a director with an exclusively horror pedigree make this? I don't know the answer to that question, but the result stands for itself; in the seventeen years since Tank Girl, Talalay has not directed another feature film.

And then there is Lori Petty, and whatever Talalay's contributions to this flick, it is my belief that how you react to the film will depend entirely on how you react to Lori Petty. I have, as far as I can tell, never seen her play anything but Lori Petty, from this movie to those ill-conceived "go baby go" commercials the NTRA came up with in the late nineties. Every time I have seen her on a screen, big or small, I have found her insufferable, obnoxious and ill-spoken (in the sense of needing elocution lessons rather than a remedial English class). I was thinking that that personality makes sense for this role, but it didn't help. I couldn't watch more than ten minutes of the movie at a time. I also blame the movie for killing the promising feature career of Ice-T, who previous to this had turned in sharp, smart roles in underrated movies like Ricochet, Trespass, and Surviving the Game, and who afterwards was reduced to Johnny Mnemonic, 'R Xmas, and, god help the poor guy, Frankenpenis, the John Wayne Bobbitt movie. In fact, I think the only actor in the entire film whose career was not at least temporary negatively affected by it was Naomi Watts.

Be that as it may, and despite Petty and Talalay, the film isn't all bad. Watts is good, as she usually is, though her part is far smaller than it needed to be, and the rippers, among whom are Ice-T and Reg E. Cathey (The Machinist), are kind of fun, even if the make-up effects on them look as if they were designed by a six-year-old girl with a teddy bear fetish. But prepare to watch in small doses. **.