SYNOPSIS: In “The Stunt Driver,” a new dramedy now playing in theatres, Jay Baruchel is Ken Carter, a real-life Canadian stunt driver who plans to drive a rocket car across the Saint-Laurent River, from a 90-foot-high ramp.
CAST: Jay Baruchel, Ed Helms, Ben Foster, Laurence Leboeuf, Joe Cobden, Marc Beaupré, Dan Bakkedahl. Directed by Mike Dowse.
REVIEW: Don’t call Ken Carter (Jay Baruchel) the Canadian answer to dare devil Evel Knievel. “I’m no daredevil,” says Carter. “I’m a stunt driver.” Both performed gravity defying car jumps that put their lives on the line time after time, but Carter, nicknamed The Mad Canadian for the sheer audacity of his stunts, felt that his American counterpart was too showy—“He dresses like a Dallas cowboy cheerleader.”—and often referred to him as “Madame Knievel.”
When the action in “The Stunt Driver” kicks in Carter is planning a career defining stunt, a mile-long jump across the St. Lawrence River in a rickety rocket powered Lincoln Continental. “Evel Knievel has Snake River and I need mine,” he says.
With an NFB film crew documenting the elaborate, but under-funded, construction of a giant ramp pointed toward the mile-long gap over the river between the Quebec launch site and the American landing pad, Carter battles safety concerns, ego, delays and a reluctant engineer (Ed Helms) in his quest to make history and place his name on everyone’s lips.
Rather than recreate Carter’s acts of daring-do “The Stunt Driver” uses the NFB archival of his jumps to great effect. Director Michael Dowse mimics the style of the vintage documentary, seamlessly blending the old and new footage.
The sheer spectacle of Carter’s jumps adds a blast of excitement to the film, but it is the character study that lingers. Baruchel vividly brings the Carter to life, finding the sweet spot between the character’s bravado and his insecurity. Carter was a big personability and Baruchel captures that, his sharp tongue and impulsive behavior, but it’s not a caricature of fast-talking show off. It’s a portrait of a guy who wants to be remembered; to leave something of value behind. An underdog, he’s equal parts, destructive and ambitious, willing to risk his life for glory.
Dramatically, there is a built-in anticlimactic twist to Carter’s story that drains some of the story’s emotional momentum, but despite the unexpected gear shift, the film doesn’t crash and burn because it remains, ultimately, about the human cost of Carter’s ambition.
Heartwarming is not usually a word that comes to mind when reviewing vampire movies, but somehow it applies to “Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person,” a new French-Canadian coming-of-age film now playing in theatres.
We are introduced to teenage vampire Sasha (Sarah Montpetit) at her birthday party. At first glance it’s a normal birthday celebration, if maybe a little dour, with presents and a clown. But the clown isn’t hired to entertain. He’s brought in by Sasha’s mother (Sophie Caideux) and father (Steve Laplante) as a special treat, a meal to commemorate the teenager’s vampiric coming of age.
Trouble is, she is too empathetic to kill people. “I’m in a very delicate position,” she says. “where I’m forced to do bad things. The problem is, if I don’t do it, I’ll die.” She can only feed off people she feels a personal connection to. Her fangs won’t even appear unless she is comfortable with her prey.
“I don’t need to kill people,” she tells her horrified parents. “to know I won’t like it.”
When a vampire pediatrician diagnoses her with an unusual degree of compassion, she survives off blood-bags supplied by her father.
Her cousin Denise (Noémie O’Farrell) tries, and fails, to teach her how to find victims in bars. “Pick your favorite,” she says. “I’ll show you how to bleed him.”
Fed up, her parents cut off her blood supply, triggering an existential crisis. Entertaining thoughts of ending it all, she comes across a support group for depressed people, and meets the world-weary Paul (Félix-Antoine Bénard), a downcast teenager with very little hope for the future. Sasha is 68 in chronological, human years old, but looks seventeen, so the two become friends.
When Paul learns Sasha’s secret, he offers to save her life and be her next meal.
“Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person” breathes some of the same fetid air as
“What We Do In The Shadows,” “Let the Right One In” and “Only Lovers Left Alive” in its creation of a vampire world that intersects with our own. Quebec filmmaker Ariane Louis-Seize builds a world for Sasha to inhabit that feels familiar, like our reality filtered through a Tim Burton lens.
Atmospheric and gothic though it may be, the movie is actually a tender-hearted story that uses the undead to celebrate life.
“Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person” is brought alive, pun intended, by Montpetit and Bénard. The darkness of the premise is lightened by the palatable chemistry between the leads. Their work gives this off-kilter teen rom com an undeniable sweetness in its exploration of teen life and search for identity.
