Michael DeZubiria
RPM would seem to be a rip-off of Bruckheimer's ridiculous Gone In 60 Seconds, until you realize that it was made three years earlier but didn't generate any attention (and for good reason) until Gone In 60 Seconds came out, and hardly even then. David Arquette is spectacularly miscast as a car thief who steals cars not for the money, but for the rush (and for the all but pulsating cliché) because, he believes, all the right things end up with the wrong people. That turns out to be true in RPM, since there are such a wide variety of beautiful cars getting stolen from complete morons. One man, for instance, meets Famke Janssen's Claudia on some remote mountain road, attempts to get her drunk on his champagne (on the shoulder of the road, of course, not at home or anything), and then she ties him up and steals his car in front of his very eyes. He is, as would any thinking person, completely incapable of removing his own belt from around his ankles (or even thinking to do this) in order to save his precious car. He doesn't deserve it anyway.We learn early on that Luke (David Arquette) has a way of getting around the police, since his father is able to pull some strings with them (mainly with his massive checkbook), which he does only because Luke keeps coming up with cool little gizmos that make him a lot of money but that he uses to help him in his stealing adventures. There is a particularly belligerent scene early in the film where a female officer comes to arrest him, and he sneaks out of the building and casually flees the scene in her cruiser, with the siren on. Because that's the safest way to escape, of course. IN a police car. With the SIREN on. Let the forehead slapping begin, but don't get your palm too sore yet, it gets much better.The plot of the film is a pathetically thin spider-webby clothesline of a thing that is barely strung together with a lot of awful, awful scenes, each seeming to try to outdo the last. I've seen James Bond do a wheelie in the cab of an 18-wheeler, and I just about fell out of my chair at the stupidity of THAT, but it's WAY outdone here. Luke is in Nice, France (evidently for no other reason than to pack the film with bad accents), with the hopes of stealing the greatest discovery in automotive history (the RPM, which runs on a gasless engine), and after stealing a Bond-style car, he makes a quick stop on the side of the road to rescue a damsel in distress from some street punks (which he does just as casually as if he were picking up a friend who was waiting for him). As he's running from the police for stealing the car, he drives UP the side of a tunnel, and lands it on the roof of an oncoming big rig (commenting, `I haven't done this in a long time.') This is, all joking aside, a serious contender for the most jaw-droppingly ridiculous thing I've ever seen in a movie in my LIFE.Later, Claudia goes to steal a fancy red car, and after flirting with it's idiot owner, she decides that, instead of ditching her Jeep and jumping into the sports car, she'll just grab the wheel and drive away with both of them. Yeah, you know how sometimes people will ride a bike and hold onto the handlebars of a second one? Evidently this can be done with cars, too. It makes you wonder if anyone read the script before the movie went into production, or if anyone actually watched the sad, belligerent mess that it became before they released it. Cars are hard things to push, I've done it. For the most part, they're pretty heavy machines. But I suppose that in some mythical world where the police jump off of their motorcycles and into moving vehicles before those vehicles show any signs of attempting to escape and where mechanics slide under the cars they're working on feet first, women as skinny as Claudia can push a car while driving another car and only holding it by the steering wheel.Arquette simply cannot handle the role that he is given in this movie. An ever present cigarette is not enough to make him able to play a hardened criminal, he's too much of a lovable goofball. This may be, by the way, how he can steal a car, get caught by it's naked female owner, and turn her into a car thief as well the same day, and then convince her to help him steal the RPM. In one of the most laughable lines in the film, he informs the audience, `The place was like Fort Knox, holding the biggest automotive breakthrough in history. I was gonna have to be good.' Well, luckily for him, the replica of Fort Knox was of the kind that doesn't notice low-flying aircraft dropping off red-flag car thieves wearing bright blue jumpsuits and cute white roller-blades, unconscious guards laying just outside the wide-open main entrance and, my favorite, that employs technicians and mechanics that flee the scene like frightened cattle when the lights go out, leaving the greatest breakthrough in automotive history alone with a couple of car thieves that have made their way into the central vault with little to no difficulty whatsoever. It's amazing no one has tried to attack the real Fort Knox after watching this, if it's that easy to get into.(spoilers) RPM is a bad movie that is not likeable as a bad movie, the way films like Death Race 2000 are. This is not enjoyable camp, it's ridiculous garbage. The prize for stealing the RPM is a ludicrous one billion dollars, but of course when he's close to getting the money, Luke decides that it would be cute to demand TWO billion dollars (which he demands in true Dr. Evil form, except without any sense of amusement and, luckily, without holding his pinky to his mouth). There is, of course, the obligatory idiot romance, which turns out to be with the woman who caught him stealing her Viper, but also the suggestion that there is a frustrated romance between Luke and Claudia (who later turn out to be brother and sister). Just after all of the mechanics flee the RPM like scared children, Claudia asks Luke why they can't ever be close, and he responds with a line the grammatical correctness of which reflects the sheer lack of intelligence in the rest of the movie.`Because every time I turn my back on you, you stole everything I ever had.'
Dave-330
Where to start really? Arquette trys really hard to not make this movie horribly bad, but unfortunately carries it even further down the hole. Whether by design (as a spoof) or on purpose (REAL drama (HA!)), this movie lacks really anything of... well anything. Arquette's voice-over work is the only thing even remotely entertaining, and that is because the soundtrack is actually NOT out of sync with the characters lips. It seemed like I was watching a Chinese film, or even worse a Godzilla movie, rather than a film done mostly in English. It becomes really annoying after about a minute, and makes the whole film seem even cheaper.Oh yeah, plot! The characters are Arquette, his dog (who he refers to and speaks to like a person through the entire movie (AGHHHHH) and is the second main character in the whole production), Famke Jannsen, and the French girl. Basically Arquette is a car thief, so is the dog (sorta), and Jannsen is one as well. The French girl is just obligatory, so you don't have to watch Arquette speak and act to the dog for the whole ninety minutes.The plot is that the two (three (four)) of them are supposed to steal a prototype car. Sounds cool right? Sorry, you are treated to bad chase scenes, a bad helicopter scene, dumb plot twists, cheesy dialogue, bad acting, Arquette panning to the camera at every second possible, AND NO REAL PLOT. Every scene just seems to outdo the last one for being amazingly bad. You don't believe me, here's an example SPOILER: Arquette happens to just end up pool side of the naked girl who's car he just stole, and the same car was stolen from him, and the girl is the former girlfriend of the guy funding the stealing spree. END SPOILER. Is that dumb or what? Come on, how many coincidences can you shove into a movie and just blow off.I used to think that Congo was the worst movie ever made, now I may have to reconsider. The movie looks like it was made in the early 1980's, is dubbed like Godzilla, and has Hudson Hawk (which by the way I enjoyed)-type plot twists, but lacks the creativity to make them enjoyable, and has BAD acting. Heck, they couldn't even make the police car look like a US police car, instead they just marked Los Angeles on the side of a French police car. I don't see very many marked Yugos in the States.Sorry, I got off on a rant... just don't bother viewing this, obviously very few people have and that is for the best.
