Wild Goose 'Chase'

directed by Adam Rifkin

starring Charlie Sheen and Kristy Swanson

Ironic distance is no longer an excuse for anything anymore, Have you noticed how many ads these days ask you to laugh with them at the images they present? Or all the shows which make the most of their banal material by offering hosts who find the stuff as stupid as you do? Videos are sexist and dumb, but we can sit with Beavis and Butthead and laugh at them instead of suffering the indignity of actually just watching them. Old b-movies are silly, but on "Mystery Science Theater 3000" we can sit with some robots and have a good chuckle.

But wait a minute: Beavis and Butthead are also sexist and dumb! Those robots aren't anywhere near as cool as R2D2 and C3P0! I've figured out a simple formula:

"send-up" of [adjective] thing = [same adjective]. So a cool jokey advertisement that makes fun of stupid manipulative ads is, surprised, stupid and mainpulative. A TV show that tires to give us some distance from the mind-numbing banality of music videos is, you guessed it, mind-numbingly banal. A movie which attempts cleverly to poke fun at the genre of bomb chase movies will be hard-pressed not to end up as a dumb chase movie. The same with "The Player:" for all its inside jokes and self-affacement, it ended up seeming too much like the kind of movies it attempted to lampoon.

The only people who have successfully evaded this formula are Matt Groening and company. "The Simpsons" is always full of "send-ups" of various cultural phenomena, but what makes them work is the lack of ironic distance at all. "Itchy and Scratchy" is not as different from "Tom and Jerry" as you might think. The informercials playing in the Simpsons' living room are almost exact replies of those playing in my living room right now.

The most telling moment in the hour or two of celluloid I sat through with a bunch of weird-looking film critics at a special screening of "The Chase" last week: not when a truck-load of corpses spilled onto the highway, creating "mass havoc," not when the heroine "comically" vomited out of her car window; not when Anthony Kiedis and Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers made a dorky cameo; not even when the two protagonists, a kidnapper and his hostage, had sex in a speeding car with thirty cops on their tail. No, it was none of these things; it was when, at the end of the movie as the credits rolled, the words, "Executive Producer: Charlie Sheen," appeared on the screen. Usually we are given this information at the beginning of a film, but something tell me that Sheen, who, as the kidnappers, is on screen for 90% or more of the film, was too embarassed to admit this little detail until at least half of the patrons had left the theatre. Only from the mind of a two-bit Hollywood actor could such a project burst forth, like Athena from the head of whoever. This movie sucks.

At the beginning of the movie, my friend leaned over and whispered "What if the whole movie is this chase?" Well, he was right; the movie begins with a guy kidnapping a babelicious heiress and hitting the road for Mexico in her car, and that's it, the chase keeps up until the movie ends. Oh, what a devious way to undermine the function of the Chase in film! Wait until the French get a hold of this! What we get is a surreal and paradoxical mix of "high-speed" vibes (mostly due to speedy cuts from shot to shot) and incredibly dull footage of two people in a car, cruising at 30 MPH tops, with a bunch of police cars meandering down the highway after them. Every few minutes there's a big explosion, or the corpses start to fly, or she throws up, or they fuck...and then It's right back to a Sunday drive down Highway 5.

Particularly irking is this film's massive debt to perhaps the greatest film ever made, "The Blues Brothers." I've often wondered why the film industry didn't just up and shut down after that film was released; "The Wasteland" had such an effect on Eliot's contemporaries. "The Blue Brothers" was also a comedy; it also featured a poignant commentary on the decline of post-WWI Europe--oh, no, hang on a second, that was "The Wasteland." The Iudicrous chase scenes from "The Blues Brothers" are clearly a model for "The Chase" in its entirety. But while the former relied on such quaint thing as acting, good music and good cutting to produce something genuinely pleasurable, "The Chase" makes half-assed attempts to replicate the same gestures--cop cars piling up down a hill and flipping over, cars driving through road blocks. Our culture needs a "send-up" of "The Blue Brothers " about as badly as it needs, well, special press screening of movie like this.

There's another level to "The Chase" ripe for masturbatory intellectual appreciation--part of the fantasy is that the LA media catches onto this drama right away, and a lot of the information we get is from accounts of the chase on news shows. This is admittedly kind of funny at times, but unbelievably heavy-handed. Look, it screams, how the media and entertainment industry will resort to anything to produce copy! I get the message loud and clear, but I wonder if Charlie Sheen realizes just how ironically that message comes across.

On the other hand, Henry Rollins does have a starring role.