Review of Shuttle

Shuttle (2008)
I'm still laughing!
1 May 2009
Warning: Spoilers
May 2nd: someone clicked 11 NOs, and then proceeded to do 15 more on my previous 15 comments: almost as funny as this turkey!

May 1st:

As I write this, I'm still very much under the impression of what must be the funniest thriller I've ever seen. I've got a major case of the giggles, but I'll try and calm down. (It's kind of hard to write when your nose spills snot and the mouth ejects sporadic drool onto the keyboard.)

A pair of young women who just returned from a vacation take a ride on a shuttle bus. A couple of young guys join them. But the bus isn't really a taxi service: it's a kidnapping vehicle. (Don't snicker!) Its driver has been part of an organized "white slavery" gang who snatch young women from airports, and they've been doing it for FIVE years. (Don't laugh.) Five years on the SAME airport, without the police or even the FBI ever getting any wind of it. (No giggling, please.) Apparently, dozens of women go missing on in the same exact place for years and years - and yet no-one notices a trend. Is the FBI that incompetent? The world of "Shuttle" seems to consist of three types of people: easily kidnappable blonds, dumb/comatose/invisible FBI agents, and omnipotent psychotic gangsters (who hate sexy blonds with tattooed behinds).

The driver has barely stayed alive on this one mission, and yet he's done this for - I repeat - FIVE years, without being killed or losing one of his limbs. (Stop laughing...) Did I mention that the driver is immortal? Need I mention it? We all know that movie psychos have immortal DNA. You can stab them, bounce them against the walls of a bus repeatedly, caress them softly with a hammer, prick nine-inch nails into their ears... Hell, you could stick a hand-grenade into the average Hollywood psycho's mouth, and he'd still escape with only minor scratches. No, the driver is not Satan or even a minor demon, but just a regular Hollywood psycho with better survival abilities than the biggest, meanest sewer cockroach.

The basic plot outline: A guy loses all the fingers on one hand in a silly scene. (A magical bus that reads and obeys minds!) The passengers try to escape. They fail. They get hurt. They sulk. They argue. They try to escape. They fail. They get injured. They argue. They try to escape. They fail. They get injured. They try to escape. They fail. They try to escape. The kidnappees manage to snatch the gun from the driver! Alas, they do not kill him because the Golden Hollywood Rule Of Gandhi-like Pacifism prohibits them from doing it. (No giggling.) One of the other passengers turns out to be part of the gang! (Stop laughing.) He is played by an actor who studied in the Rob Zombie/John Travolta School Of Over-Acting & Silly Mugging. He threatens rape. Later on, one of the gals hits him with a crowbar over the head, about a dozen times... very hard. Only seconds later does he regain consciousness. Yep, he survives. (Immortal, remember?) He gets killed a little later. (No idea how, though! He is not supposed to be killable.) The kidnapees argue. They try to escape. One of them escapes! Alas, the psychos are just far too God-like in their powers not to re-capture their prey. The game starts all over again: the passengers try to escape. They fail. They sulk. They stare into the void. They get hurt. They try to escape. They fail. They get hurt...

You get the picture.

Frankly, I believe that a drugged, heavily disorientated, inebriated snail would have escaped these nincompoop captors with ease. There were so many opportunities. At one point these bumbling psychos (remember: FIVE years!) even send one of the kidnapees into a grocery store! She leaves a message to the police. However, yeah... you guessed it: this fictional fairy-tale U.S. city has no police.

And just as you thought the movie couldn't get any dumber - not even if Luc Besson and Brian De Palma joined forces to lend a hand with the script - it does. The girls are kidnapped in order to be sent to some remote island(?), and this is achieved by transporting them as cargo. Apparently, this fictional America has no FBI, no police - and no border customs either. It does however have immortal criminals with more luck than twenty lottery winners. One blond had her billionth chance to kill the driver, and yet she failed. How is it that victims in these dumb thrillers NEVER try to finish off their immortal adversaries once they have them down on the floor and injured? I guess I answered that one myself: they're immortal! So why bother trying, she must have thought...

So why was one blond gassed to death and the other one boxed and shipped alive (complete with a kitty-litter box, and the funniest photograph since Demi Moore's primary school pictures)? Could it be the tattoo? I think they killed the prettier one, but that's just me. Was her tattoo that ugly?

Could it be that I don't care? Why should I search for logic in a movie made by imbeciles (for imbeciles)? Besides, how can I even think straight when I'm laughing so hard half the time?!

Naturally, this being a 21st-century horror/thriller, the mobile phone doesn't work... Perhaps this invincible gang control not only the FBI, the police, and the customs, but satellites in space too.

Do I have to spell it out? There are far easier ways to kidnap people. And far more intelligent people who should be making movies. Give an idiot a camera and he'll lay an egg every single time... That sort of answers the eternal riddle of which came first: the egg or the bird-brained director.
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