Movie Scene
'Joyride' is implausible guilty pleasure

By Marshall Fine
The (Westchester, N.Y.) Journal News

JOY RIDE (Rated R for profanity, graphic violence) Two-and-One-Half Stars (Fair-to-Good) Two brothers on a cross-country car trip use a CB radio to pull a prank on a truck driver — who then comes after them. Implausible but enjoyable; a guilty pleasure. Starring Steve Zahn, Paul Walker, Leelee Sobieski. Directed by John Dahl. Twentieth Century-Fox. 98 mins.

It's possible to create a preposterous thriller that hangs together through sheer chutzpah. Steven Spielberg did it a quarter-century ago with "Duel" and so did the much-maligned 1986 film "The Hitcher."

But "Joy Ride," which aspires to the ghost-story quality of an urban legend, can't quite pull it off.

Paul Walker ("The Fast and the Furious") plays Lewis Thomas, a college student on the West Coast who offers to pick up a prospective girlfriend, Venna (Leelee Sobieski), at her college in Colorado on the way back East. On the way, however, he bails his older brother, Fuller (Steve Zahn), out of a Utah jail.

Fuller is the family black sheep, a talkative, lying, impulsive rascal. With too much time on his hands during a cross-country trip, he convinces his younger brother to pull a prank using their car's CB radio.

So Lewis pretends to be a female driver with the handle Candy Cane. He hooks what sounds like a lonely trucker, whose CB handle is Rusty Nail, and makes a date to meet him at a roadside motel, going so far as to give him a room number. Then Lewis and Fuller check into the room next door to watch the fireworks.

It blows up in their faces, however, when the angry trucker goes to the rendezvous and finds a traveling salesman. He brutally murders the man i and, when Fuller and Lewis make their freaked-out getaway, they discover that the trucker has somehow discovered their identity and is now following them, stalking them on the CB while apparently watching them from the anonymity of his truck.

There is a certain mechanical irony to what happens, as a pattern is quickly established: Think of the worst-case scenario and that's what comes next. From that point on, "Joy Ride" becomes cartoonlike, with a series of cause-and-effect encounters in which the action seems less inspired than pro forma.

Part of the enjoyment comes from watching Zahn act his tail off. One of the most engaging of the Gen-X crop of actors, Zahn skates the line between sly and untrustworthy with a sneaky, ingratiating smile. He easily takes the movie away from Walker, who can no more hold his own with the wily Zahn than he did with Vin Diesel in "The Fast and the Furious."

Dahl is skillful enough to make "Joy Ride" involving. His pace allows the audience to zoom past the hard-to-swallow moments. He makes it OK to enjoy "Joy Ride," but can't quite manage the feat of turning the script into a good movie.