The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2019:Tank Girl (1995), directed by Rachel Talalay

The Trailer

and

The Appropriate Tune: "Boys Wanna Be Her", by Peaches

       I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: The 1990’s and early 2000’s were the best time for comic book movies. Sure, you didn’t have Marvel churning out some new crap every couple of months, in fact Marvel was practically dead in the water around this time, but it was also a time where you could actually see a movie based on a comic book that wasn’t just from Marvel or DC. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Crow, American Splendor, Men in Black... Some of them might not have been quite up to snuff, although who doesn’t love John Leguizamo as a fat demon clown, but at the same time it’s nice to see some degree of separation from the superhero status quo that we’ve been subjected to for about a decade, because it gave comic books fans some hope that comic books were finally being recognized as a storytelling medium worthy of adaptation like novels and plays. The possibilities were endless; Love & Rockets: The Movie, an Elfquest trilogy, Sam and Max Do America. What a time to be alive, if you only focused on that and not all that other horrible shit that going on in the world at the time. 

Released in 1995 under United Artists and directed by Rachel Talalay, whose previous directing credits include Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare and Ghost in the Machine, which probably doesn’t feature Sting at all, Tank Girl was based on the British comic series/character of the same name created by Alan and Jamie Hewlett, the same Jamie Hewlett who would later go on to international acclaim with his co-creating of Gorillaz with Damon Albarn. The film takes place on a post-apocalyptic Earth (destroyed by a comet passing over us turns out, and not any of the several other ways we’ll all be dead by 2033), where the control of water means power, so much so that even the local fascistic empire decided to name themselves after the idea. Lori Petty stars as ‘Rebecca’ (she is never referred to once as Tank Girl, always a great sign of things to come), an often drunk and very disorderly woman who’s just trying to eke out a living hanging out with her friends, scrounging for supplies, and avoiding both the forces of Water & Power and the Rippers, a mysterious band of killer mutants that have no love for the remnants of the human race. However that meager existence is forever altered when Water & Power raid their little hideout, killing Rebecca’s friends and enslaving her to do vaguely defined slave labor. Which, unbeknownst to Water & Power and its devious leader Kesslee (Malcolm McDowell), might have been the wrong move, as Rebecca is completely uninterested in the slavish lifestyle, like violently so. Plus there’s a tank right there so...yeah she’s just gonna leave.

Featuring Ice-T as a talking kangaroo man.

Alright, let’s start with what I liked about the film. I think they made a good choice with casting Lori Petty, as she’s got the look of Tank Girl down pat, and I don’t know if there’s anyone around at the time who could have done it better. I like the soundtrack, consisting of some of the best alternative butt rock of the time, including Bush, L7 and Veruca Salt. The two animated sequences in the film were also a real treat, as well as the abundance of art from the comics the film used as well. Honestly makes me wish we had gotten a Tank Girl animated series, in the vein of MTV’s The Maxx or HBO’s Spawn.

       As for what I didn’t like about the movie...well that was pretty much everything else. Now I wouldn’t call myself a Tank Girl superfan or anything, but I have read a few issues, and to me the world of Tank Girl was a combination of Mad Max, Tex Avery and an Ed Roth painting. Dirty, anarchic, rife with social commentary, all wrapped up in classic Sex Pistol chic, and Tank Girl was the poster child of that world. The OG riot grrl, an amoral, hedonistic punk who got her daily dose of id satisfaction through wanton acts of  extreme violence and debauchery (intended or otherwise). The kind of woman you’d think you’d want having your back in a bar fight, because she takes no one’s shit and dishes it out twice as hard, but chances are she’d kick your ass too after she ran out of whiskey. Maybe not the most nuanced character ever written, but a perfect fit for the leather and chains, chaotic neutral comic book scene of the late 80s through the mid 90s. 

       Tank Girl the movie is not that, although it tries to be. It tries to craft this gritty dieselpunk world by showing a lot of sand and industrial equipment, but there’s no grit! In this fucked-to-death scrap of dust where the most common career path is ‘dessicated corpse’ and water is such a limited resource that the bad guys literally invented a killing machine that sucks it out of people, everything feels so clean and plasticine, like ten feet away they're filming an episode of Star Trek. It’s the same with Lori Petty, who despite some slight glimpses of TG generally comes across as goofy child than a badass rebel icon. In many ways it reminds me of The Mask, which began life as a gritty, ultra-violent comic book that was then transformed into cartoony, PG-13 fare for the silver screen, including the now dated cultural references and shoehorned in musical number. Except that movie worked thanks to them getting Jim Carrey, and Tank Girl doesn’t thanks to them getting Ice-T dressed up as a kangaroo man.

       The pacing is also rather bad. The movie is about an hour and forty-three minutes long, and it feels like 15 hours before Tank Girl actually actually touches a fucking tank, so they’ve got to shove the rest of the movie into what’s left. Then when she actually becomes Tank Girl the movie poops its pants in confusion at how to fill the rest of the time. We get an ‘infiltrate the club to get the MacGuffin’ scene, a dress-up montage, a huge song and dance number, and then the MacGuffin is immediately retaken, rendering the whole sequence completely pointless. Then suddenly TG and Jet (haven’t mentioned her yet, basically she’s the live-action version of the shy girl in every anime you’ve ever seen and I guess the deuteragonist but she’s barely relevant) are looking for the Rippers to build an army, then a cut, and then the next scene they find them. The whole thing really needed another go round on the cutting room floor, although I’m not sure it got the first pass, considering the fact that during the climactic fight scene at the end they couldn’t even edit out those wires actors use to leap higher.

       Also, this might be a personal thing, but I fucking hate the Rippers. They’re supposed to be kangaroos but they look like the Who’s from the live action Grinch movie fucked a Gremlin, they’re played as an existential threat to the big bad despite there being only about ten of them, and every second their annoying, bucktoothed asses are on screen feels like some new kind of torture that ought to have been banned by the Geneva Convention. The fact that they got Ice-T, a man who at one point was cool as hell, to dress up like a bargain bin Klingon and growl at people is almost as bad as being forced to imagine Lori Petty banging one of these butt-ugly monstrosities. Why is their skin so blotchy, if I may ask? Pretty sure I’ve never seen a kangaroo with rosacea, or is it the human DNA that causes skin conditions. Give me the Ewoks any day, seeing moldy Care Bears using sticks and rocks to kill space Nazis is far less insulting to my intelligence than this.

       So this is going to be a firm ‘No’ on the Tank Girl recommendation from me. I’m sure that there are folks who can find a diamond in the rough with this one, but to me it was tedious, and that’s the one sin I can’t forgive in a movie. Malcolm McDowell couldn’t save it. An appearance by James Hong couldn’t save it. Art by Peter Milligan couldn’t save it. If you want a comic book movie from the period watch The Crow or the first TMNT movie, if you want Tank Girl just read the comics, both options are a better use of your time than this movie. Or just skip the movies entirely this Halloween and buy yourself a tank. Never know when it might come handy.