DIRTY MARY CRAZY LARRY it ain't

Rating: Null/10 (27 July 2001)

I should've gotten off on it: the previously undistinguished director, Rob Cohen, stages two of the most amazing action set pieces of recent vintage--a nighttime drag race that approaches "2001" trippiness, and a car-and-truck joust that seems to smash together virtuoso sequences from DUEL and RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK. And the whole thing seems (deliberately or not) to be suffused with an aura of Roger Corman/AIP down-and-dirtiness. I amused myself trying to think of how it would have been cast in 1973: Jan-Michael Vincent as Paul Walker, and...Robert Blake as Vin Diesel? There's even Ted Levine, giving a fine performance as the requisite drive-in-movie Good Guy Cop in a Bad Suit.
So what's not to like? Well, Paul Walker, Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez and Jordana Brewster, basically. The movie has Gary Busey attitude but a Freddie Prinze, Jr. heart. Though Diesel is a good actor, he seems to have a thought bubble above his head that says, "Hmmm! I seem to be turning into the gen-y Stallone! I think I like it!" Walker tries hard and probably isn't worse than most male ingenues of this sort in the post-Gary Wopat era. But Brewster, a handsome, burnished-skinned, Ali McGraw type, is much too suburban and poshy for the white-trash role of Diesel's waitress sister, and Rodriguez, as Diesel's main squeeze, scrunches her face up into a just-sucked-a-lemon sneer and keeps it locked there for two hours.
Where is this era's Robert Mitchum--hell, where is its Michael Madsen? The movie's heart is in the right place, and it's engaging enough, but it needs some guys who seem to have never in their life, not once, touched a bottle with the word "moisturizer" on it.