The Hitcher

    For the first fifteen minutes or so I’m not really sure what this movie thinks it’s doing. C. Thomas Howell is driving cross-country, falling asleep at the wheel in the middle of the desert, and picks up hitchhiker Rutger Hauer mostly to keep himself awake. Rutger comes across as scary from the jump, refusing to answer basic questions, acting threatening, and about nine minutes in is openly stating his intentions to murder the driver.

    But we’re fifteen minutes in, we know he’s not going to, these are the two leads. So we’ve got one character threatening another with something that clearly isn’t going to happen. Here’s where you’d like some actual character building, some insightful dialogue: Rutger gives a creepy monologue about why he’s doing what he’s doing, or Howell gives a teary anecdote about how it’s always been his dream to drive across the country and see the ocean, something like that. Instead we have weak dialogue about how much blood is in eyeballs and Howell constantly on the verge of tears. I’m sure we’re being set up for character growth, he’s going to fight back and grow as a person and all, but instead of feeling tension I’m waiting for the previous quick close up of the ‘door ajar’ light to come into play.

    Which it does after Rutger gets too menacing, Howell panics, and just … pushes him out of the car door. Which … sure. It’s 1986 and an older car. As Howell speeds away, loudly relieved, we cut to Rutger picking himself off of the highway, looking at the car speeding away, and smiling slightly. I’m of two minds about this: I think it might have been more effective to not see him until he inevitably turns up in the middle of a diner somewhere, gasp horror, but that smile does a lot of work setting up the rest of the movie.

He's charmed despite himself.

    The movie snaps more into focus in the next few scenes because it becomes very clear the plot of this movie is not Rutger trying to kill Howell, it’s Rutger just absolutely fucking with him. And in a cruel way it starts to become fun. Howell is driving down the road, feelin’ fine, and a family in a sedan passes him. He waves to the kids and then up pops Rutger Hauer’s head from the back seat, smiling back. He later finds the family killed on the side of the road. He’s driving along, comes across an abandoned repair shop, and stops to call the cops. It turns out the phone is dead. He turns around and Rutger is there, smiling, and tosses him the keys to his own car which he left in the ignition before just turning and leaving. Later Rutger’s at a gas station he comes across and blows the place up. He has any number of opportunities to kill him but doesn’t even try. He just continually fucks with him.

    At 24 minutes in we cut to a bus interior and have an unmotivated close up of a woman (played by a positively fetal Jennifer Jason Leigh) and we now have our third character. She works at a ‘Gas Eat’ and opens up the place for the day. Howell bursts in, asks to use the phone, and finally manages to call the cops. They tell him to wait there for them. He cleans up in the bathroom while she makes him some food.

    And … then the movie loses me. Once other people become involved the suspension collapses and the silliness starts to grate. After some decent small talk with the waitress he’s eating some fries she made, an expression on his face I really can’t parse, and finds a finger among the fries, which makes no sense. She literally unlocked the place to let him use the phone. There is technically a shot of the unattended food for like three seconds so sure, that’s when Rutger unfurled himself from the thin air and smuggled the finger amongst the fries.

Seriously, how bad were the fries?

    The cops show up and immediately arrest him, thinking he’s the killer. Okay, thinks I, this at least makes some sense, it was established that Rutger had access to his car earlier at the abandoned garage, clearly he’s framing him. But it’s odd that the movie is pulling this trigger at the half hour mark. The police interrogate him then stick him in a cell. Howell wakes up from a bad dream about Rutger and finds the door of his cell is unlocked. He wanders out into the police station and finds that the entire staff has been murdered. He hears sirens approaching, grabs a gun from a corpse, and takes off into the desert.

    Before it was goofy fun how Rutger was always able to turn up at just the right time to fuck with Howell. They were in the desert, there was just the highway, it made enough sense that I was able to overlook it. But he’s such a super serial killer that he silently takes out an entire police station, unlocks Howell’s door, and it doesn’t make any noise?

    After wandering through the desert Howell comes across another gas station with an outside telephone. As he starts to make a call a cop car pulls up. As the cops get out he bursts from the telephone box, pulls his gun, takes them hostage, and demands they start driving, which I’m not sure I fully understand. A brief hostage negotiation takes place over the radio as the Chief of police convinces him to come in. Just as he agrees Rutger pulls up beside the car and nonchalantly shoots the two cops, causing the car to swerve out of control. So he has magic radio listening powers as well as teleportation. Man, Howell sure is screwed.

    This game of super-powered cat and slightly-below-average-mouse continues. He shows up at a diner, Rutger is suddenly there. Howell threatens to shoot him, Rutger smugs back that there are no bullets in Howell’s gun. He leaves him some bullets wrapped in a handkerchief and poof he’s gone. Howell sneaks aboard a long-haul bus taking a break, putting the bullets in the gun. The woman from the diner earlier is on the bus as well. He rather quickly convinces her he’s not the killer and they takes seats in the back. Instead of character development we instantly have a cop car pulling the bus over. Howell sighs and decides to try to turn himself in again. As he’s surrendering one of the arresting officers decides he’s just going to kill him for ‘resisting arrest’ and the waitress intervenes, firing Howell’s gun and escaping with him in the cop car. There’s a fairly decent chase where they manage to cause two cars chasing them to swerve and crash. Then there’s a police helicopter with an assault rifle.

    Since this movie has already snapped my suspension of disbelief like a twig I can hardly complain when Rutger is suddenly pacing their getaway car in a pickup, casually aims with a pistol, and with three shots causes the helicopter to plummet out of the sky, crashing onto the highway and taking out the three cop cars following them. He then just as casually drives off.

Huh.  How about that, a police copter.

    So now the movie has clearly established that the real world just exists as a backdrop to whatever kooky mayhem Rutger feels like dishing out. And I want to be mad when two scenes later, after Howell and the woman check into a motel and have something like a character scene, Howell goes to the bathroom to take a shower and Rutger is suddenly in the room, staring down at the woman in the bed. But I can’t really be mad because that would involve caring, and clearly the movie doesn’t, so why should I?

    The rest of the movie until the end is … interesting. I can’t tell if the writer wrote himself into a corner and this is what he came up with or if this is what he intended the entire time. Howell runs out of the motel room, looking for the waitress, and of course there are cop cars driving around. He tries to run but is grabbed by some cops who for once are not trying to arrest him. They lead him to a tractor trailer where the waitress is tied by her hands and feet between the truck and the trailer, Rutger gunning the engine. They send him in to talk him down. Rutger gives him a gun and tries to get him to shoot him but Howell won’t as Rutger’s foot will come off of the clutch and the girl will die. Rutger sighs, disappointed. Y’know movie, there’s a difference between leaving a backstory ambiguous and just having your bad guy act any which old way to get your plot where it needs to go. Negotiations fail and the woman is ripped apart entirely off-screen.

    The cops take Rutger into custody and Howell is a free man. After a brief interrogation scene they load Rutger into a prison transport while the chief and Howell take off in another direction. Howell warns the chief they won’t be able to hold Rutger, to which the chief scoffs. Howell grabs his gun, forces the cop out, and drives off. He catches up to the transport just as Rutger has finished killing the cops on board. Rutger jumps out of the back of the transport and crashes through Howell’s windshield. Rutger’s about to finally kill Howell when he stomps on the brakes, ejecting Rutger out of the windshield and onto the highway. After a standoff where the car won’t start and Rutger shoots a shotgun at the front of the car it starts and Howell smashes into him.

    Howell gets out of the car, grabs the shotgun, and pokes Rutger to see if he’s still alive. He turns away, Rutger stands up behind him, classic slasher movie style, and Howell simply turns and shoots him in the chest several times. Credits roll over Howell leaning against the car, smoking a cigarette.

The face of a badass.

    I remember bits and pieces of this movie from back when it was on rotation on HBO. I’ve picked up snippets over the years, heard about how violent and nihilistic it supposedly is. Somewhere in a box I have the book collecting Roger Ebert’s most negative reviews and the review for this movie just drips with loathing. ‘Diseased and corrupt’ is a characteristic phrase (I do agree with his complaints about the waitress’ death). What’s interesting is that he misremembers the very start of the movie and incorrectly connects it to the end. In his version it opens with Rutger Hauer lighting a cigarette and ends with Howell lighting one as well and he laments the fact that the movie didn’t do more to explore the bond between these two characters. What actually happens is that Howell both opens and ends the movie lighting a cigarette, which means that even when he’s wrong Ebert can write a more interesting character dynamic than the writer of this movie.

    Even though it was widely condemned at the time by today’s standards this maybe pushes past PG-13 limits. You could show this entirely uncut on basic cable with maybe a couple of curse words muted. Apparently 1986 was a much more innocent time when off-screen and implied violence was just as bad as showing it. Rutger Howell is as fun to watch as ever and I have to say this is the best performance I’ve seen C. Thomas Howell ever give, faint praise though that might be. It’s clear in its story, it does setup and payoff entirely satisfactorily, the direction and cinematography are workmanlike, nothing special but not bad either. Lots of browns and static shots.

    What genuinely confuses me is how all of the critics, both positive and negative, didn’t pick up on just how goofy this whole thing is. Listen, Jason is supernatural, I’ll buy his teleportation powers and ability to survive knives to the brain. But Rutger Hauer is just supposed to be some guy. It was criticized at the time for his lack of backstory, but again that’s pretty common these days and not a deal-breaker, but he’s not supposed to secretly be the devil, or Howell’s split personality manifesting, or anything like that. He’s supposed to be at the exact same time just a guy who likes killing people and also someone who can take out a police helicopter with a pistol one-handed while driving sixty miles an hour off-road in the desert. That’ll kill my suspension of disbelief faster than anything Freddy Krueger has ever done.

    It’s not a bad movie, if you’re a Rutger Hauer fan it’s worth a watch. Just don’t ever, for a second, try to justify how his character manages to do a single thing he does. Finger in the fries my ass.