ROAD GAMES

This is a decidedly odd Australian film starring two US actors, Stacy Keach and Jamie Lee Curtis, which is a kind of inversion of ‘Duel’ in that the hero of this story (played by Keach) is the truck driver, who goes by the name of Quid.

He's a singular character who plays harmonica whilst listening to Mozart, keeps up a one-sided conversation with his pet dingo Boswell, and is apt to quote lines of poetry at the drop of a hat.

There’s a serial killer on the loose who is murdering and dismembering young girls. Quid, admittedly on the basis of not a whole load of evidence, begins to suspect the driver of a green van to be the killer.

When he picks up Pamela (Lee Curtis) they immediately strike up a rapport and she’s more than happy to help him prove his theory, especially when it becomes apparent that the van driver is trying to frame Quid. 

This leads to a suspenseful sequence which has echoes of ‘Rear Window’ when she climbs into the Van to try to get evidence, especially to see what is inside a sinister ice box.

When she is whisked away in the Van it looks like we might be heading for a straightforward thriller-type ending.

But instead we build to a surreal and darkly comic conclusion in which the Van, Quid’s truck and a police car all end up in a narrow alley, before Pamela is rescued, and the driver of the Van is arrested.  In attendance, most implausibly, are various characters who earlier crossed Quid’s path one way or another, mostly for comic relief.  

Given that both Keach and Lee Curtis are very watchable and that their brief scenes together are a delight, it's a shame that she disappears for the whole of the third act, before popping up again at the very end.

This contributed to a sense of disappointment in how the film plays out.   Although I was entertained throughout ultimately it was a case of the total being less than the sum of the parts.  It's an odd and somewhat uneven mixture of Hitchcockian suspense undercut by black comedy elements which could be described as Tarantino-lite. 

And not to be a nit-picker I did find it hard to make the plot add up in some respects.  At one point Pamela sees the Van parked near where she and Quid are staying overnight but she doesn’t tell Quid, so nothing comes of this.  Then after she is driven away in the Van we and Quid see her happily chatting to the driver.  

Notwithstanding my reservations though it's certainly worth a watch.

RATING: ✓ Cheers