Movie Review

Redline (PG-13)

Jed Dreben

Movie Info

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Hollywood.com Says
This unintentionally hysterical romp makes The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift look, well, good. But be careful not to blink, as Redline is sure to be Gone in 60 Seconds.

Story
You can’t buy happiness so why not waste millions of dollars betting on illegal drag races between rare exotic cars. That’s just what L.A. pimp/record producer Infamous (Eddie Griffin), movie mogul Jerry (Tim Matheson) and a sociopath counterfeiter known to his family as Uncle Mike (Angus MacFadyen) like to do with their free time and seemingly endless piles of cash. These guys will gamble on just about anything: For example, they bet $1 million Uncle Mike’s nephew can drive from L.A. to Las Vegas in under two hours. An impossible feat, made more so by driving at night, racing at speeds of over 200 mph through windy desert roads using special night goggles and zipping past CHiPs unnoticed like the Road Runner. But the annual multi-million dollar race is coming, and Infamous needs a driver. Enter the movie’s hero and narrator, Natasha (Nadia Bjorlin), who has retired from racing and is busy pimping rides and fronting a hair-metal band. After some teasers, the mega-stakes illegal drag race kicks off deep in the Nevada desert, where a fatal mistake costs one racer their life and another their freedom.

Acting
The script gives little if any help to the actors in this scattered camp-fest meets a misogynistic hip-hop video—starting with funnyman Eddie Griffin, basically doing standup and one-liners throughout. Angus MacFadyen (Saw III) brings some presence to the drowning film, with his shell-shocked Martin Sheen/Apocalypse Now parody—strange drunken dances to boot. Veteran actor and man of a thousand bad parts, Tim Matheson--who has managed to stay afloat with B movies since his glory days as Eric “Otter” Stratton in Animal House--actually seems to be having a little fun here. Sadly, though, the rest of the supporting cast is easily forgettable and, at times, comes off a little too much like the cast of a late night Cinemax skin-flick. Too bad Redline is PG-13.

Direction
Redline is Andy Cheng’s (End Game) second time helming a feature film, but he is no stranger to movie sets, as his past credits include a myriad of stunt coordination work in films like Rush Hour and The Scorpion King. A lot of his early work was spent on Jackie Chan films, which explains a lot about his directing style with Redline. Part of the charm of a Jackie Chan film is, well, Jackie Chan and all his amazing moves, but take out Chan and leave the ridiculous cartoon characters and inane plots that surround his Hong Kong reels, and you have Redline. Amidst the awkward one-liners and misplaced acrobatic fight scenes choreographed to unidentifiable hip-hop music, some of the car races--as when a Porsche 911 takes on a $1.2 million Ferrari Enzo--are actually quite cool. This is where Cheng really shows his chops, and he makes the most of his limited resources, creating a really tacky, however, absolutely superbly bad-funny cult classic. Redline would have made an excellent double-feature back in 1975, alongside Death Race 2000, boasting: “See the world in the year 2007 where decadence rules and reckless millionaires live and die by fast cars and even faster women.”

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