Driver

Considering that Andrzej Sekula, director of The Pleasure Drivers, was Quentin Tarantino's cinematographer on Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs, it's not too surprising that this 2005 film sometimes echoes the latter's approach. Indeed, were it not for the fact that the story makes little sense, the dialogue isn't funny, the characters are poorly drawn, and the acting is almost uniformly sub-par, you might think this was the work of Tarantino himself. As it is, Sekula has made a movie that clearly values style over substance, achieving a modicum of the former and almost none of the latter. Screenwriter Adam Haynes' story revolves primarily around a low-life "caregiver" (Lauren Holly) tending to a mentally unstable young man (Angelo Spizzirri) whose father, some kind of cult leader, has been less than forthcoming with the financial support she depends on; her solution is to kidnap the kid's equally weird sister (Steffany Huckaby). Meanwhile, a full-of-himself professor-therapist (Angus MacFadyen) who constantly whispers Freudian drivel into a tape recorder finds himself rejected by his wife and glommed on to by an oversexed student (Lacy Chabert). These folks, along with "a vicious lesbian hit woman" (no, really), come together somewhere in the Southern California desert, where the film mercifully comes to a close. Sekula favors moody lighting and odd camera angles, the better to illuminate a cast of scenery-chewing, unlikable characters drifting through a tale that will intrigue almost no one. The cover blurb notes that The Pleasure Drivers has been "described as funny, sexy, edgy and dangerous." Maybe so, but that description must have come from someone who didn't actually see it. --Sam Graham