Vanishing Point: Worst. Car Chase Flick. Ever.

I started this off as just another entry in My Movie Diary, but once I got going, it turned into a pretty lengthy takedown of one of the most iconic car chase flicks ever, 1971’s Vanishing Point. I decided to skip the other reviews this time and just focus on why this movie is so very crappy.

Vanishing Point (1971) – I had long avoided seeing Vanishing Point, even though it is widely considered a touchstone of the car chase genre. I thought it was probably similar to one of my father’s favorites, Monte Hellman’s existential road race flick Two Lane Blacktop. I had to sit through enough showings of that flick, with my father fruitlessly explaining why it was so great, to dread the concept of another “meaningful” series of low-angle road shots and sullen drivers blinking out at the road. Little did I know that I would actually find Vanishing Point to be much, much worse. It’s one of the most annoying movies I’ve seen in a long while. Maybe ever!

Right from the opening credits, I suspected I was in trouble. The flick starts with one of those wistful, acoustic-guitar, singer-songwriter numbers that begins every self-important 70s feature. We see a bunch of local cops setting up a roadblock for an unnamed guy (Barry Newman) in a white Dodge Challenger, then watch as he barrels toward them. The rest of the movie tells the uninteresting backstory of how we got to this point. The unnamed driver turns out to be a Vietnam vet/failed race car driver/former cop named Kowalski who earns a living driving cars from Denver to San Francisco.

As the flick starts, Kowalski takes a gig running that Dodge Challenger to SF. While he’s out scoring meth for the drive, Kowalski for some reason bets his dealer that he can make it in something like 15 hours, even though the car isn’t due for days. With that pointless bet spurring him forward, Kowalski proceeds to fly down the highway. Everything is going swimmingly until he encounters a pair of motorcycle cops who try to pull him over for going 150 mph. So what does an experienced long-distance driver do in this situation? Try to run them off the road and kill them for no reason, that’s what! Needless to say, trying to murder a couple of highway patrolmen doesn’t go over well with the other cops, and Kowalski ends up being pursued by a cadre of police cruisers all the way to the California border. I literally have no idea why Kowalski tries to ram the cops. Is this what he normally does when driving his route? He doesn’t look panicked — in fact, it’s hard to read a single emotion on Newman’s stoic face throughout the flick, which makes sussing out his motivation for anything even harder.

The flick quickly becomes a series of alternating scenes. Kowalski drives through some boring scenery, runs from some cop cars and somehow escapes. He has a gauzy flashback about his life before becoming an idiot car driver. He encounters some “interesting” character. Then he drives some more. The flashbacks establish Kowalski as a crappy race driver who seemingly crashed in every big race, as well as an “honest” cop who’s been run off the force. He might have had a girlfriend who was a drug dealer or informant or something, and she may hve died in a surfing accident. Absolutely none of this is interesting, or adds any understanding or motivation to the inane car chase that Kowalski is involved in. Without any context or reason for what he’s doing, the supposedly exciting car chase is nothing but a bunch of (indifferently staged) scenes of cars going fast. It’s just the story of some psycho nut who’s awfully shitty at his job. At some point, Kowalski drives off into the desert to escape a bunch of cops, where he is menaced by a rattlesnake, meets a hermit, encounters a bunch of Jesus freaks, and gets help from a meth-dealing biker and his naked girlfriend. Then he gets back on the road and barrels toward the finale that was teased at the beginning of the film.

While Kowalski speeds down the road, his “adventures” are narrated and broadcast to the world by Super Soul (Cleavon Little), a blind African-American DJ who inexplicably has a job at a podunk radio station in Colorado (which even more improbably can still be heard all the way into California). The trope of the narrating DJ has been aped in lots of better movies, from The Warriors to Do The Right Thing, but I think this is probably the first time it was used, so I guess that’s something. Super Soul enthusiastically depicts Kowalski as some kind of folk hero, as if running people off the road was some glorious form of self-expression. In one particularly dumb monologue, Super Soul declares that Kowalski is the last great American hero “for whom speed equals freedom.” This is a stupid formulation, but it seems to be the entire basis for Kowalski’s growing folk hero status. As the flick slowly, slowly wends to its conclusion, we’re supposed to believe that Super Soul’s radio show has turned Kowalski into some kind of culture hero, with crowds of supportive on-lookers cheering him on. What is it about him, exactly, that these people are identifying with? That he runs cops and motorists off the road with equal fervor? That he clearly doesn’t give a damn about anyone on the road except himself? That he’s incredibly bad at his job? That they know literally nothing about him other than he drives a car?

Anyway, the boring chase eventually ends up in a small town in California, where the cops have set up a couple of bulldozers as a roadblock. I have never been so ready for a chase to end. It wasn’t until the flick’s famously nihilistic ending and I was able to see the whole shape of the narrative that I really got pissed, though. This thing is supposed to be a Christ allegory! As I was watching the movie, I wondered where they were going with all of the religious stuff and Jesus references. Little did I suspect that Kowalski is supposed to be some kind of modern-day Jesus, sacrificing himself for the benefit of… well, I’m not quite sure. The Jesus allegory is undeniable, though. He wanders the desert, encounters a snake, and resists temptation (in the form of a naked woman who offers him sex with the casual grace most women reserve for offering napkins to someone who’s spilled milk). The credits even roll over yet another Jesus song. I feel that the filmmakers missed a key difference between Kowalski and Jesus, though: Jesus wasn’t a meth-addled dipshit. Vanishing Point desperately wants to say something about society or humanity or religion, but it’s really just a bunch of boring scenes of a glass-eyed narcissist driving through the desert, hung on a flimsy and poorly-done manhunt movie. Why are we supposed to see Kowalski as a hero? Who knows. The entire exercise is so pretentious and self-important that’s it’s hard to care.

As if Vanishing Point‘s pretentions to deep thought weren’t bad enough, the flick doesn’t even make sense as a car chase movie. I’ve already pointed out that Kowalski runs the cops off the road for no reason, ensuring that he’ll be chased from state to state. He also beats the car he’s delivering to hell, so it would be worthless even if he did make it to Frisco. Worst of all, about a half-hour into the flick, the cops know who Kowalski is, who he works for — and where he’s taking the car! He’s delivering the car to a specific address in San Francisco, so why don’t the cops just stake the place out and wait for him there? There’s literally no reason to chase him at all. Car chases pre-suppose that the chasers don’t know where the objects of the chase are going. If they did, they wouldn’t need to chase them. The entire justification for the movie is completely bogus. Not a single thing about this movie rings true, from first shot to last. This is why I hate introspective late 60s/early 70s cinema, encapsulated in one endlessly annoying movie.