Directed by Takeshi Koike. Written by Katsuhito Ishii, Yôji Enokido, and Yoshiki Sakurai
When I was young, I’d go to this after school club and doodle. Furnished with pens and markers, my friends and I would dream up monsters and machines and our drawings would fill a pinboard along the wall: giant lizards with spiked mohawks, fanged arms sticking out their leather jackets. Aliens with eight arms gripping the two handles of a motorcycle, its wheels spiked and spinning.
The cars spit flames,their wide wheels split lanes, flames were everywhere. We wanted to conjure something outrageous, wild, and dangerous and that same frenetic imagination seems to power Takeshi Koike’s Redline as racers in a far-off future go wheel to wheel in a gruesome race on a hostile planet ruled by military fascists.
The cars are every shape and color, weapons galore hiding in their sidepanels. Engine enhancements, punched in and activated like missile launches, see drivers bend both their cars’ frames and the fabric of nature itself. They all dream of competing in Redline, a race held every five years and watched by everyone throughout the known universe. No holds barred, no real rules, it’s vehicular carnage.
Late to the starting grid after blowing his qualifying heat is JP (Takuya Kimura) a punk rock rockabilly with a shady past of suspected race fixing who this time seems intent on realizing his dreams of going all the way. Starting their engines alongside him are seven others with the need for speed, each wild in their assembly: bounty hunters, cops, princesses, a man who’s more of a machine, rogue military officers, and so on.
The imagination of Kimura and the creative collective cannot be faulted, because the universe of Redline is both grotesque and captivating. The race itself, the circus surrounding it, the gravity it seems to have throughout the cosmos: the edges are only defined insofar they come into contact with Redline, so the movie stays close to the action with a one-track mind, giving just enough fodder to suggest a rich world of interplanetary politics, ancient witchcraft, futuristic arms manufacture, and humanitarian crises.
It’s all lost in the dust-up once the race is on, but it’s enough to make you feel there’s a world outside the race, as rich and chaotic as what goes on the track.
While Redline has the unbound and rambunctious imagination of a young boy, it also has the same attention-deficit disorder, as the story doesn’t make use of its intriguing background in any meaningful way, and some plot lines are abandoned once the potential for a cool set piece is tapped. It’s a sleek machine with a barebones interior.
Its characters are similarly wan, and there’s not a single one you’d care to save in a house fire. They are merely cardboard cutouts behind the wheel, and Redline does present its female characters in the most cliché of ways as standard waifus who seem mere scaffolding for their chests to breast boobily and for men to want to bed (or wed, if you’re feeling generous).
This is to say you shouldn’t expect high drama from Redline nor a character-driven study of how a subculture can pose a rebellious threat to autocratic governments. What it does offer in one long unbroken engine snarl is an outpouring of imagination obscene and intricate, animation that you can feel, and one of the best representations of mind-bending speed put on the big screen. A riot that never climbs down from sixth gear.
Mikkel Frederiksen 