Death Proof Review

Tarantino has called this his worst, and the honesty is more impressive than the film. Built as a grindhouse throwback with scratched reels and a missing sequence, it splits into two nearly identical halves, each opening with a long stretch of young women talking in a bar. The talk is meant to be the pleasure, but it circles without accumulating, and the second group is less interesting than the first, which is a fatal thing to discover ninety minutes in.

What survives are two pieces. The car crash that ends the first half is staged with a cruelty that no other director would sustain, replayed from four vantage points so you cannot look away from any of them. And the finale hands the film to Zoe Bell, a real stunt performer playing herself, strapped to the hood of a Challenger at speed with no digital safety net, which is the one thing here that no other movie can sell you. Kurt Russell is genuinely frightening and then genuinely pathetic. Everything between those pieces is a director enjoying his own voice alone in a room.