Rubber - 1 star

A tire comes to life and starts killing people. How does it kill people? By using its telekinetic powers to make their heads explode. Sounds like an interesting idea, doesn't it? Could make for a good grindhouse exploitation style movie. Unfortunately, it sucks. It is the most boring movie about a killer tire I have ever seen.

Writer / director Quentin Dupieux is trying really hard to be clever with this movie. The film opens with a man in a suit standing on a lonely dirt road. On the dirt road, a bunch of chairs are set up. Then a car appears and proceeds to drive over each chair. The chairs are not set up in a straight line, so the car has to swerve all over the place. When the car comes to a stop, the trunk opens and a police officer gets out. Then he walks right up to the camera and starts to address the audience. He talks about how movies always have an element that makes no sense, and as he talks, he makes less and less sense.

Then we see that he is actually addressing an audience. A group of people are standing on this dirt road. They are stand ins for us. They are going to watch the events of the movie unfold through their binoculars, and they make comments that we the actual audience are already thinking (like how boring the movie is).

Soon enough, the tire comes to life. This is fun for 5 minutes or so. First the tire learns to stand upright and move, and like a toddler learning to walk, it keeps falling over. Eventually it learns to move. Then it encounters an obstacle (an empty bottle). It discovers it has telekinetic powers by breaking the bottle so it can continue on its merry way. Then it discovers animals, blows them up, discovers humans, blows their heads off, and so on.

Meanwhile, this audience is watching the tire and getting hungry. These people came out to see a show, but for some reason they have no food and they either can't leave, or they are not willing to. They have sleeping bags, so they can sleep out there in the middle of nowhere, and get up in the morning and resume watching the show. There is a short subplot about how the people in charge try to poison and kill the audience, and I think the filmmakers are trying to make a comment on what they are doing to us with this movie, but it doesn't really work.

The movie is an interesting curiosity, but there is no reason to ever watch it.