This year is 2017, and "Fast and Furious" has just raised the bar for car chase movies to destroy hundreds of cars in ten seconds, and every ten minutes there must be physics-defying flying stunts, and the next one is about to fly into space.
In such an era, the budget is only 34 million, three or five cars chased for a long time, there are almost no four-wheel acrobatic off the ground, a total of less than ten cars crashed into action movies, will there be a market?
When the writer and director column has Edgar Wright's name written on it, you can be 100% sure: don't look at regret!
It turns out that fans' idolatry of Wright has once again not failed.
"Extreme Car Thief God", a beautiful and improper car movie, in this blockbuster summer slot, with a maverick illusion into a fast dark horse.
With this new film, which has a 94% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes, the ghost director from England is trying to tell us that today's drag racing movies have somehow gone down the path of over-cartoonatization.
Just like a first-class love movie doesn't let the protagonist say more love words, to create a car chase movie that hammers the adrenaline, it doesn't have to make the car jump all over the sky.
Come and get to know your baby, a fair-skinned teenager who has left a double after-effects on his body and mind due to childhood trauma, so that he has to wear earplugs to listen to music 24 hours a day.
It's hard to associate his smile, which is a mixture of charm and shyness, with his amazing driving skills, but he is indeed the famous car god in the city.
Again and again, like a magician, under the siege and interception of the police car brigade and helicopters, he calmly fled with the robbery gang.
Of course, his life is not as cool as it sounds, but is crammed with worrying contradictions:
He needs to save money to support his elders, and he is very resistant to crime; he works as a driver for the robbery group, but he hates violence in his heart; he tries to prevent his accomplices from killing people while doing illegal things; he wants to live with his girlfriend, but he is forced to continue to fight for the criminals.
In his precarious adventure, he struggled between the pressure of the good and evil forces in his heart, waiting for a suitable opportunity to escape from all this.
Fans of Edgar Wright know that he tried to shoot through every genre and genre, and always in an anti-genre and anti-genre way.
For example, "Shaun of the Zombies" is an improper zombie film, "Hot-Blooded Detective" mocks the police film routine, "The End of the World" does not follow the routine to tell an alien invasion, and "Crooked Boy Scott" is probably the most authentic and therefore the most alternative two-dimensional movie.
Angry at that, he was expected to make "Ant-Man" a comic book movie we have never seen before, but who made Marvel executives a bunch of conformist bastards.
▲ Ghost director Edgar Wright
Through "Extreme Car Thief", Wright takes the car chase movie and challenges the mainstream aesthetic of the genre in this era.
Or rather, he dialed the time in two hours and took us to see what the bloody car chase scene was like when people talked about drag racing movies.
There is no doubt that in the fancy era of car chases, Edgar Wright had a rare prerogative preference, which bloomed unbridled and stunning.
He has listed ten of his favorite drag racing movies, including "Dead Point", "Mighty Soldier", "Tiger's Mouth Pulling Teeth", "Police Network Brave King Kong", "French Drug Trafficking Network" and other old classics.
Slightly more recent, it is also a retro real-time player "Spy Heavy 2", "Mad Max 4" and so on, so we are very clear about his taste.
▲Classic drag racing film "Tiger's Mouth Tooth Extraction"
In particular, "Tiger's Mouth Pulls Teeth" has an impact on Wright that doesn't stop at action design. Skilled and taciturn hired drivers, responsible for robbing gangs to run away, but are involved in black conspiracies, bringing a lot of plot setting and character development inspiration.
Compared with "Extreme Car Thief", in 2011, another "Outlaw Driving", which tried to restore the charm of "Tiger's Mouth Pulling Teeth", although it will not become a second-rate cargo, it is also much inferior. Sorry, Nicholas Winding Reyfern.
We all know very well that at the moment, no matter how hard the filmmakers claim to have destroyed many real cars and how desperate the stunt drivers are, the era of real cars shooting and real crashing and falling cannot go back.
But under Wright's lens, he deliberately avoided touchscreen phones, thin and light laptops and any more fashionable electronic products than ipods, and between gear changes, frequent switching between throttle and brake, accompanied by rock and blues golden songs from the 1980s and 1990s, simulating time travel to the greatest extent.
The chase in the film exudes a restrained and cautious madness, and after watching it, you don't want to go all the way home, but can't help but emulate the coolness of the concentration, a charming willpower that can still maintain the concentration of rational thinking in the chaos around you.
Given that the plot is not based on a fantasy setting, "Extreme Car Thief" is not as imaginative as the Blood and Ice Cream trilogy, but it has its own Wright's signature little fun.
For example, the popular cultural labels of the 80s and 90s: the robber couldn't figure out "Halloween" Mike Miles and the actor of the same name who starred in "Ace Spy" (to be honest, I was also confused N years ago), and also pulled the Jason cushion back of "Friday of the Thirteenth".
The mean tone and lines they debated once made the rude criminals look like the geek boy of "House Trouble", and the cold joy exploded.
For example, the uninterrupted love scene for fifteen minutes, so delicate that it is like the display of the law of attraction between men and women, almost making you forget that this is a dark crime movie.
For example, the baby and the male and female thieves each fled for their lives, went around and met again, and the black joke of fate blossomed.
For example, the hard-hitting villain, who does not have the steel and iron bones of the Terminator, but convincingly escapes from death again and again, just for a suitable burial.
Happily, after two Guardians of the Galaxy turned the sale of collections of old songs from the seventies and eighties into a trend, there was finally a movie that could compete with them, and "Easy" alone was worth it, wasn't it?
And it also proves one thing, film music does not have full of dissatisfaction, not to use indiscriminate words, as long as it can add color to the atmosphere, even if it is loud from beginning to end and large enough to explode the eardrum, the audience will applaud.
Finally, I want to mention the love between the baby and the restaurant waitress, which is also a romance that does not belong to this era.
The first half is a variation of Wright's beloved Outlaw Star, a man who is forced into committing a crime, driven by love, trying to break free from this predicament.
The second half is mixed with Quentin's "True Romance", where men want to join forces with the girl who meets Pingshui to break out of the siege, and everywhere bursts with the courage to fight with a weak enemy and a backwater.
Whether it is a lingering date or a chase between you and me, all kinds of cars are involved in it, turning into the catalyst for this desperate love affair, which is also the cultivation that a good car chase film should cultivate:
Cars are not sacrificial props, they should be like characters, exuding dignity and individuality.
Finally attached:
Edgar Wright's favorite ten drag racing scenes:
"The Lost Point"
Spy Movie 2
"True false police"
"King Kong is not bad"
Mighty Men
"Tooth Extraction from the Tiger's Mouth"
Mad Max 4
"Fluke Double Heaven"
"Police Network Brave King Kong"
The French Drug Trafficking Network
Edgar Wright's favorite ten robbery movies:
The Killer
"Donkey Kong the Great Thief"
The Eleven Arhats
"Breaking Point"
Thunderbolts and Scuds
"Falling Water Dog"
Action Italy
Outlaw Star
Treasure Thief
The Line of Fire