Drive-Away Dolls

Not good.

Two young women embark on an impromptu road trip down to the fun and sun of Tallahassee, Florida. However, things quickly go awry when the duo crosses paths with a group of inept criminals and dirty politicians, all of whom are looking for the briefcase full of dildos that have ended up in the trunk of their car.

The Coen Brothers mysteriously broke up long ago, and ever since, despite their efforts otherwise, they have continued to show the world that the sum of their parts is much, much less than the whole ever was.

Case in point… this film.

Honestly, if I didn’t know that Ethan Coen wrote and directed this film, I would’ve called Drive-Away Dolls a shallow pretender to the Coen bros’ style, but since I can’t do that, instead I’ll just say that for a film so focused on climaxes, its own climax was so unremarkable that I didn’t even realize it had happened until a moment before the credits were about to roll.

You would think, upon sitting down to watch this movie, that for a crime film that takes place on a long hot summer road trip through the humid swamps and moldy old strip malls of the deep South, with a killer title like Drive-Away Dolls, that you’d have some real old school Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry - Two Lane Blacktop style exploitation cinema ahead of you, with all of its wild titillation and rowdy excess spun together in that oh-so-familiar quirky Coen brothers style. Now, maybe it’s on me for having that expectation in the first place, but after watching Drive-Away Dolls, I think it’s fair to say that the film also believes that this is what it’s giving.

But it’s not.

The story goes like this… It’s 1999, and Jaime is an overly-loquacious tall glass of water. She’s a sleeveless-tee-wearing young alley cat of a “Hawksian woman" with a pronounced Texas drawl. Marian, on the other hand, is all business casual button-down, her hair worn in a tight and serious little ponytail. She’s short and to the point, both in words and appearance. For their own personal reasons, Jaime and Marian are running, literally and metaphorically, so together they are taking an impromptu road trip to get away from it all. But, since neither one of them actually own a car, they sign up with a service that provides folks that need to get somewhere with cars that need to be driven somewhere.

I don’t know if this is a real service, it seems too potentially ridiculously irresponsible to actually be real, and I can’t imagine the type of person who would not only need to use this service, but would be willing to surrender their car to it, because I can definitely imagine the kind of fuck-ups, meth-heads, and all around dipshits who would sign up to get paid as a driver. Of course, being that the whole business idea sounds incredibly dumb, and is very obviously fraught with a ton of potential problems, all of which could only end with the destruction of the car… that probably means that it does actually exist, and is probably very popular in certain regions in this country, like the rural Midwest and between the small cities and gulf coast towns of the South.

So… okay fine, I’ll accept that this service really exists.

Anyway, the hook of the movie is that, as the girls drive away, they do so unknowingly transporting a briefcase full of dildos made from the molds of various white Christian leaders and GOP politicians. This briefcase, through a series of typically Coen bros coincidences and misunderstandings, has been left in the trunk of the car, and for some reason, a bunch of cartoonish dipshits are now killing people to get ahold of it.

Maybe the most annoying part of this whole film for me is the idea that a dildo that has been made from the mold of a White GOP/Christian politician’s penis, especially if it was somewhat noteworthy in its size, would be the kind of thing that, in order to avoid a scandal, would be worth killing to recover. The idea that a dildo that has been made from the mold of a White GOP/Christian politician’s penis would be a scandal for anything more than a moment these days, that it would be anything more than the briefest of blips in the news cycle, is absolutely ludicrous. Especially in a “boys will be boys” good ol’ boys and their high-fiving bros world that is this country. Even dumber than that, the idea that the unapologetically hypocritical White Christian GOP voting base would bat an eyelash at this “scandal” in between their red-faced and screaming apoplectic fits about saving children from having to learn about actual history, other cultures, and the greater world, or banning whatever they think CRT is, and anything else that frightens them, all while trying to deport any and all immigrants who don’t come from “white” countries, while working on outlawing all birth control, women’s healthcare, interracial and same-sex marriages, and ultimately angling towards being able to ship all of the “uppity” POC, as well as every single member of the GLBTQIA community off to camps, is absolutely patently absurb.

Of course, I do believe that the current crop of white Christian thought leaders and GOP politicians would be dumb enough, not to mention vicious and entitled enough, to go straight to murdering a bunch of people in an idiot-attempt to head off this “scandal” so maybe it’s not so outlandish after all…

Anyway…

I’m not exactly Mr. Mature when it comes to jokes. You show me a video of someone farting on an indignant victim, or that video of the Hippo farting in front of all those nice families, really any video featuring farting…? I’ll laugh for hours. So, I feel like I can say that just the simple fact that dildos exist… It’s just not that funny. Or all that shocking. It’s not the 1950s anymore, old man Coen.

But this film seems to disagrees. Or at the very least, it seems to think that an allusion to the life and times of the famous 70s Arena Rock groupie Cynthia Albritton is gonna blow your fucking mind, man.

I’m not going to tell you that this film is “bad,” because it’s not. I liked Jaime and Marian quite a bit. They’re both a pair of charming mother fuckers, and there’s scenes with them that deserve a much, much better movie, but the rest of the film? It’s… fine. That’s it. It’s fine. It’s just overwhelmingly fine. Which is the entire problem really, I was not expecting this film to be so “fine” to be so incredibly bland, and worst of all, to be so boring.

That’s it. There isn’t much else to say about this film. It’s not good, but not in any memorable kind of way. Drive-away Dolls is cinematic water off a duck’s back.

Absolutely forgettable.