Which is not to demean it at all: it is as hard to make a good thriller as it is to make a good art movie. Perhaps it’s harder — you have the looming ghosts of genre convention to contend with. It’s not like this kind of movie hasn’t been done before (see Steven Spielberg’s Duel, in particular, for one antecedent of Joy Ride). Too much originality and you bend the genre and piss off your producers
as well as the audience, which expects the conventions. Too little originality and you bore everyone.
Dahl has made notable attempts before to reinvigorate the thriller format, with The Last Seduction and Red Rock West in particular. Here he takes on the kind of thriller that has to do with a small group of characters being terrorised, and he brings to it a nicely dark sense of humour as well as considerable technical skill.
Joy Ride is the story of two brothers, Lewis (Paul Walker) and Fuller (Steve Zahn), and the trouble they get into when a prank goes wrong. Lewis is driving across the United States, as Americans do, to see his girlfriend. On the way he stops to pick up his brother, who has just emerged from a stint in jail. Fuller is a decidedly mischievous character, and when he gets a Citizen’s Band radio installed in his brother’s car (“This is like a prehistoric Internet or something!” he crows), one begins to sense that something is going to go wrong.
As, of course, it does. Fuller persuades Lewis to help him deceive someone out there in CB-land — and suddenly everything goes avocado-shaped. Basically, they manage to make a crazy trucker very, very angry. I won’t give away more of
the plot than that; each development is so finely calibrated that it’s a pleasure just watching the story unfold — the peculiar pleasure of being scared, ourselves, by what’s going on, but enjoying it because it’s so well done.
The leads are good: Zahn, in particular, is perfect, goofy enough to be likeable, even when we’re aware he is someone practically destined to mess up and make life a misery for everyone else. Leelee Sobieski as Venna, the girlfriend, fills her role well, with just enough strength in her to prevent us seeing her as purely a victim. Walker, as Lewis, is blondly (and a little blandly) good-looking, the very picture of the decent, well-bred boy next door. Just the kind of person you want to see subjected to a little psychological torture. As we are.