What a stunning piece of shit this movie is. Bereft of any indication of cinematic talent in front of or behind the camera (save for the ability to turn one on and point it at random stuff), Redline continues the mind-boggling trend of films that choose to justify their existence by piling on layer after layer of meaningless excess, to the point that even Tony Montana would be repulsed by its rotten spectacle. While it is typical for a review to encapsulate some basic who’s and what’s about the movie in question, half of the fun of watching this bombastic train wreck is predicting which 40-year-old cliché it is going to recycle next. Not that any of it really matters. Redline seems to exist primarily to showcase one nonsensical car chase after another—hardly an odious purpose, but one that this film’s jittery camerawork and haphazard editing fails to even remotely satisfy (cinematographer Bill Butler seems to have successfully placed the camera in the worst place imaginable for every single shot). It takes some kind of perverse talent to cram this many bad decisions into a single film, the collective performances so emotionally sterile and poorly written that one wonders if the cast only agreed to the movie by means of hypnotism; the characters are so thinly drawn that the narrated introductory montage feels like something tacked on in post-production, lest viewers not be able to figure out who’s who in this fabulous disaster. All the while, Redline attempts to whoop it up for Fast and the Furious geeks by means of vehicular pop songs (“I want to be your car tonight/So you can take me for a ride”), senselessly distorted racing footage (now in Wide Torso Vision!), and repeatedly celebrating one’s right to drive in excess of 200 mph on public roads. Unimaginative garbage like 300 flatly worships a culture in which weak babies are tossed unceremoniously off a cliff; similarly amoral, Redline suggests that if you don’t feel the need for speed, then you’re just another potentially dead and utterly forgettable innocent bystander. Then again, even if you’re a dead teenager after having sailed through the finish line upside down, backward, and in a twisted pile of blazing metal, it’s only one hilarious scene of purported emotional agony before you fade from memory. Excuse me while I petition for the driving age to be raised to 30.
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