'Joy Ride' Takes a Gleefully Scary Trip

Joy Ride," a sly and scary thriller-chiller, is the latest from John Dahl, maestro of neo-noir, and it is terrific escapist fare, stylish, outrageous and compelling. Many have tried but few have been able to draw upon the sardonic fatalism of classic noir as effectively as Dahl to make films that are completely contemporary in tone and humor, beginning with his "Red Rock West" in 1993, which was soon followed by "The Last Seduction" with Linda Fiorentino as an unforgettably heartless femme fatale.

This slam-bang Fox release strikes precisely the right note and never lets it go. Leelee Sobieski is a pretty and surely popular college girl and clearly knows it. When she unexpectedly needs a cross-county ride to New Jersey with the arrival of summer vacation, she knows just whom to call: Paul Walker's Lewis, who's at another school some distance away but also somewhere in the Southwest. She's fully aware that he's had a crush on her since they were kids and really works it to her advantage over the phone. Never mind that Lewis has a plane ticket in hand: He's out the door in a flash to buy a rust-bucket used car just to be on the road with the girl of his dreams.

Apparently a scholarship student and quite possibly from the other side of the tracks from Sobieski's lovely and self-confident Venna, Lewis also is a good guy. Before he picks up Venna, he stops at a prison to collect his older brother Fuller (Steve Zahn), who is being released and is surprised that Lewis has shown up.

Fuller has trouble written all over him. He's reckless, zany but not surpassingly bright, and so volatile and edgy that he could be a little crazy and therefore dangerous. He's a bundle of energy that's been pent up for a long time, and his understandable latent jealousy of Lewis, who has his life together, makes him pushy and needling--to the point that Lewis finally reads him the riot act. Fuller, however, is irrepressible by nature and, during a stopover, has a used CB radio installed in the car behind Lewis' back.

By now a warm camaraderie between the brothers has surfaced. Against his better judgment, Lewis goes along with Fuller's urging that he assume a falsetto voice and, as the seductive "Candy Cane," come on to a trucker over the CB with the handle Rusty Nail, even making a date with him at a motel some distance ahead. It's just a joke, of course, but to be sure, Rusty Nail is not going to be amused.