Tank Girl

In a post-apocalyptic future, Tank Girl (our anti-authority hero) and Jet Girl (her sidekick) go up against the EEEvil Water and Power Corporation, several animated / animatic sequences and relationships with kangaroo-man super soldiers. A movie that ends up on the dull side of quirky.

Tank Girl (Lori Petty)
T-Saint aka Angry (Ice-T)
Jet Girl (Naomi Watts)
Sgt. Small (Don Harvey)
Booga aka Stupid (Jeff Kober)
Deetee aka Cool (Reg E. Cathey)
Donner aka Horny (Scott Coffey)
Keslee (Malcolm McDowell)
The Madam (Ann Magusson)

Year: 1995
Censorship Rating: M15+ (for some swearing, violence, adult concepts... but it's one of those movies that gets such a rating for barely touching these things, rather than wallowing in them)

It sometimes amazes me how many cult comics get turned into movies, while the bigger, better known properties often just sit untouched by cinema. It is probably the case that the cult comic property is cheaper to buy and easier for the studio to develop (read: mangle as much as possible) into a film, whereas the bigger properties are more expensive and have a greater expectation attached to them.

Who knows for sure? All I can say is that when a cult comic gets turned into a movie, few people are left happy with the results - "Tank Girl" as a near perfect example of this. Not that it's terrible or anything, just... dull. And Tank Girl the comic was famous for being anything BUT dull.

The credits kick things off with a cover of Devo's "Girl U Want" (actually covered by Devo themselves to sound like the Soundgarden version - go figure) and lots of artwork showing what the movie isn't going to come close to replicating.

It's a post-apocalyptic future - the year is 2032 and the world is screwed. A giant comet hit the Earth 11 years ago and it hasn't rained since. Things are now one big desert.

[UnSub's aside: The setting here is kind of fuzzy. Although everyone speaks with American accents, the fact the Rippers are half-men / half-kangaroo and that there is talk of New Zealand probably makes the movie take place in Australia. Not that we want it thanks; you US citizens can keep this quality of movie all to yourselves.]

Tank Girl (real name: Rebecca, but that hardly matters) rides her yak on screen - it's her boyfriend's birthday and she's scrounging for a gift. She comes across a squad of dead and mutilated soldiers who are Ripper "left overs". The Rippers [as we get exposition vomited at us yet again] are apparently "a demonic army of bloodthirsty, human-eating, purse-snatching mutant creatures" led by Dr Johnny Prophet [and here we get the first of many, many times when the movie will use artwork lifted from the comic (or in the comic style) to show what is being talked about. While not completely ineffective, it is certainly jarring, but I guess it was cheaper than actually filming what the art replaces.] The Rippers spend their time raiding WP (which stands for Water & Power [and who will be our generic EEEE-vil corporation for this movie]).

Tank Girl loads up her yak with loot and heads home, telling the audience that she and her friends "do not suck up to Water & Power" and provided they don't get caught stealing water, things will be fine. [Anyone want to bet they won't get caught stealing water and things will stay fine? Anyone? No, didn't think so...].

[Oh, if I'd remembered, I'd have tracked Tank Girl's clothing and hairstyle changes. According to IMDb.com, there are 18 of them throughout the movie. Apparently it's easy to be a smart-mouthed desert rat of the apocalypse provided you have a huge wardrobe and access to an expert hair stylist].

[Anyway, got all that exposition? Apocalypse, evil corporation, spunky heroine, rebels who don't play by the rules, mutant soldiers. Pretty standard stuff, even if the mutants ARE mutant kangaroos super soliders.]

Cut to Tank Girl's base - we get to see it in comic book form as well as the real life version. Obviously the comic book one looks a lot better, but both stand out like a sore thumb in the middle of the desert [high visibility not being the greatest idea for those stealing from an all-powerful corporation]. Inside the house, a grungy guy goes into a plant nursery to fix the water pump. Tank Girl holds a gun on him, affects a bad Germanic accent and orders him to strip. This moment is interrupted by two kids running around, with Tank Girl embracing her now naked boyfriend.

Elsewhere a girl [named Sam - not that I think we find that out for another hour] carves a scary animal thing from a lump of wood. Tank Girl shows up and quizzes Sam as to where her "Doris Day bustle" is - Sam replies that "the wood talks to me; it said Ripper". After some more adult dialogue from the mouths of children [because "peanut dick" is such a thing pre-pubescents say to each other] we cut to WP and their HQ (yes, more artwork).

Inside, Evil Boss Guy [named Keslee, not that we find that out for a good while yet either] gets to monologue that "water is life, water is power" and now WP controls "95% of the desert and all the water it contains". Out of the military men collected there, a certain Captain Douche [oh-the-hilarity] is singled out for securing "most of the desert. Douche promises that the Rippers are just a "minor setback" and soon "that final crack of land" will fall to WP. Keslee goes nuts over the "small crack" comment, indicating that a small crack today could lead to complete loss of everything in the future (with lots of glass being broken in the process of demonstrating the point). Douche is then made to take off his boots and walk across the broken [safety] glass to Keslee. Keslee calls Douche a "fool" for walking across the broken glass and that he should have tried to kill Keslee instead of taking bad orders. After hugging Douche, Keslee stabs him in the back with a device that kills Douche by converting his blood into (a surprisingly small amount) of water. Keslee promotes a Sargeant Small [who I don't think is EVER called by name and I had to work it out from the credits] to take Douche's now vacated role and then wanders over the glass barefoot drinking Douche's water just to show how EEEE-vil he is.

[Aside: Keslee is so over-the-top and such a control freak you have to wonder why someone hasn't killed him yet, or kills him after what happens to Douche. I mean, he's insane. In that situation, I'd take my chances in taking him out because, as any henchman should know, I'd be more likely to die at his hand in the long-term than anything else. I mean, he just killed the man who successfully got him 95% of the desert for not doing anything wrong. In that kind of employment environment, you would be better off either being top dog or working elsewhere.]

Back to Tank Girl - she's on guard duty and slacking off. The audience gets to see a 'futuristic' viewing display so we know that bad guys are watching the house. Sam drops in to see Tank Girl, who plays dead as a prank [oh-the-hilarity]. Sam offers to trade some food for the dangerball ('futuristic' ball that shoots blades out of one end - I'm guessing it's not child-safe) that Tank Girl found - Tank Girl agrees, but sends Sam to get some food.

Inside, Boyfriend finds his birthday present on his bed - some WP boots.

Someone in WP boots comes up to Tank Girl from behind. Tank Girl hears him and starts to seductively cut her clothes off with some scissors - but, of course, it's a WP Strike Force member [with the world's stupidest-looking pair of nightvision goggles]. The rest of the Strike Force hit the house and find out that they've been stealing water. Non-WP people start dying as a result.

The remaining WP guy wants Tank Girl to keep stripping. Tank Girl convinces him to come closer before blowing sand in his eyes, grabbing the pins out of his grenades and escaping. She then starts killing the WP guys while they shoot like stormtroopers at her. Tank Girl sees her boyfriend get shot and Sam get grabbed. A WP attack aircraft joins the fight, with Tank Girl forced to dodge mini-gun fire [good thing those things fire slow]. After killing some more WP goons [who were stupid enough to try and get out of the well-armoured aircraft whilst under incoming fire], Tank Girl runs out of ammo and gets captured. The goons decide to keep her alive to "have a lot of fun" with her. They do shoot her yak, however. Tank Girl spits on the EEE-vil Australian and gets pistol-whipped into unconsciousness for her efforts.

She wakes up on the attack copter [it's a TARDIS - there is no way the outside we saw is large enough for the size of the inside we see here]. Tank Girl [what the hey - it's TG from now on] manages to convice EEE-vil Australian she'll give him a special sexual favour... but ends up insulting the size of his manhood and breaking his neck with her legs. The other guards actually start to guard TG.

The WP aircraft arrives at the ominous WP HQ. TG appears before Keslee who appreciates that she killed 8 WP soliders. He offers her a job; TG refuses; TG get sent to work in the mines, where sadistic guards interrupt her dirt shifting duties [because this mine appears to be about as functional as that thing Conan the Barbarian spent his adolescence pushing].

Elsewhere, Small (the EEE-vil second in charge) sexually harasses a mousy girl [who I'll just save time and call Jet Girl or JG right now]. JG another prisoner who is fixing an aircraft and Small gives her the option of working the night on the aircraft or "changing my mind" - she chooses the aircraft.

TG takes a dust shower [I understand the limited water thing, but I don't think bathing in fine sand is going to get you that clean either] in her underwear. It's interrupted by Small yelling at JG; TG pretends that JG is her girlfriend, complete with sapphic kiss - this freaks Small out and he leaves [oh, as if. If he is Mr Slimeball he is meant to be, he'd so be hanging around at this point]. JG thanks TG.

Some artwork indicates a scene shift. TG emerges from hiding to try to escape and immediately climbs into an unmanned tank. Unsurprisingly, the tank has security countermeasures and TG almost gets gassed... except JG has the code she needs and saves her. JG indicates the tank is non-operational and "we are all prisoners here". Evil boss Keslee watches this on his all-seeing camera and indicates TG will be "fun to break".

Small shows up later to bust JG back down to standard prisoner status. JG cries... and keeps crying back in her cell until TG shows up with a motivational speech on escaping. Before anything else can happen, TG gets grabbed by guards and dragged off.

Keslee sees TG after she's spent a night in a big freezer and offers her a job at WP. TG again refuses in a smartmouth way and ends up in "the Pipe" - a sloped 40 foot tube that gets narrower as you go down. TG gets dropped into the Pipe and pretty quickly starts having flashbacks and video effects about the stuff that has already happened in the movie [so if you weren't paying attention before, you can see the important bits here. Everyone else: the movie is already repeating itself.]

Outside, the Rippers have destroyed "another outpost". Keslee orders TG pulled from the Pipe to help against the Rippers. TG remains defiant and almost gets Keslee to shoot her; Keslee recovers, convinced the Rippers are a worse fate for her.

TG, flanked by a large WP squad and two tanks, gets led to a possible entrance to the Ripper underground base. She gets shot with a locator beacon and frogmarched towards the entrance. Fortunately for her, the Rippers attack [and although this bit is shot to make the Rippers look mysterious and dangerous, the bits of fighting we do see make it look like the Rippers are beating up WP with the power of interpretive dance]. JG has [conveniently for the script] stowed away on the sole WP aircraft in the area and takes it over. She uses a special scanner [read: over-coloured screen] to see the Rippers kill the WP and is overawed by their alleged brutality [but as I said: interpretive dance combat is at work here, so the audience won't get quite the same impact].

TG emerges from hiding and starts looting corpses. Keslee has left an arm behind in escaping the attack which TG stamps on. JG lands and, after almost getting shot by TG for emerging from a WP aircraft, they decide to escape - TG in a tank, JG in a jet. However, TG starts clowning around in her tank and ends up clocking JG in the head with the tank's main barrel...

... which leads to the animated bit where TG beats up JG (off-screen) and they both turbo along the landscape pulling exaggerated we're-going-really-fast-the-g-forces-are-immense faces. [Aside: This bit is pretty pointless, but I'm guessing cheaper and easier than actually showing TG and JG going somewhere.]

Keslee has been badly mutilated by the Rippers - he's blind and missing that arm. His doctor tells him so and offers little hope. A new, more sinister-looking doctor offers the possibility of "cybergenic reconstructive surgery". Keslee likes this and has Small stab the original doctor in the back with one of those water extraction devices.

TG and JG are fooling around in the world's crappiest arts and craft shop when TG spies a carving we saw Sam (the little girl from TG's house) working on earlier. Caught unawares, our heroes are then bailed up by the shop's owner, a shotgun-wielding hippie earth mother until TG knocks the hippie out with a fish [in a piece of acting that would have been embarrassing if you saw it in community theatre, let alone a professionally produced film]. Using JG's homemade lie detector [how convenient to have and something we never see again] and the fact that they are fighting WP, they get information from the earth mother that Sam was sent to Quicksilver. They then decorate their vehicles (which occurs in a montage of comic book images and then lots of rapid cuts of 'wacky' things and costume changes and repeated footage [just to prolong that sense of tedium this entire bit brings on]).

Keslee is told that our heroes "took the bait" and are on their way to Liquid Silver [yes, that's right - one character calls it Quicksilver and the others call it Liquid Silver. Great continuity there, I'm sure you'll agree]. Keslee wants the girl before out heroes get her... and then the sinister doctor cuts off Keslee's head with a large pair of scissors [but in a nice touch, the heart monitor uses a recreation of the famous Japanese wave pictures to show how the heart is beating. I liked it, anyway].

Sam is working in the laundry room of the Liquid Silver, a brothel / nightclub [so you can cross 'sex slavery' off the post-apocalyptic cliche list as well for "Tank Girl"] but the Madam has organised a client for her. TG gets to go through multiple costume changes in fast forward [and ends up looking like she raided a charity clothing bin in pitch darkness, then put on what she grabbed].

Sam gets dragged along by an Iggy Pop-looking man [who, according to the credits, is actually Iggy Pop!] who is looking to take part in a schoolgirl fantasy. She tricks the guy into grabbing the dangerball and he ends up with blades sticking through his hand, letting her escape. [Aside: Okay, hold it. When did Sam get the dangerball? TG was going to exchange it for food that Sam never brought back, so TG should still have it. Even if Sam had it when she was captured, how would she have kept it - a hand-sized gold ball - given the rest of her stuff was acquired by the hippie earth mother? Yeah - IITS.] TG shows up and hugs Sam.

The Madam is upset by this, but JG (who has also scrounged up some new clothes) holds her hostage with a handgun. TG threatens to cut off all of the Madam's hair unless she sings "Let's Do It" Cole Porter-style - she does and everyone joins in and suddenly we have a muscial number. [Yikes. But one thing that completely distracted me after noticing it - Lori Petty's neck. One side has a huge bruise / scab that only appears in this section. Although it looks like they try to keep it off camera it's, well, big and can't really be hidden. Wonder what happened there and why they couldn't cover it of let it heal up before shooting this bit.]

WP raid the brothel, interrupting the musical number [what a pity] and grab Sam and don't, for whatever reason, arrest TG and JG, though both are defenseless. TG gets all upset about losing Sam again.

Keslee menaces a captured Sam with his new cybergenic arm - it can cut through solid steel thanks to the blades it has. He's waiting for TG and JG to come to the rescue...

TG (with a reluctant JG in tow) seeks the hidden entrance to the Rippers' base... which they find. The Rippers capture them and gas them with nitrous oxide to find out if they are spies. Torn between killing, "humping" or letting our heroes go, the Rippers put TG and JG in a cell.

[Aside: okay, the Rippers are an interesting idea and I'm sure where a large amount of the SFX budget went. Now, they do look very fake, but they are a good kind of fake and one that has a lot of attention to detail in it. The actors underneath the make-up all do a good enough job, but that's because I'm sure they were told to just be themselves. Also, each Ripper is pretty much defined by one personality attribute, which is why I'll be referring to the important ones as Angry, Horny, Cool and Stupid, because that's pretty much what they are.

Oh, and Ice-T, who plays Angry (imagine that...) gets the funniest line in the film with "Ain't gonna be no crumpets and tea!", delivered in his special pissed-off tone. Made me laugh every time I saw this movie!]

While in the cell, TG and JG get Stupid Ripper to tell them the Ripper origin story - how the army wanted "the ultimate soldier" so they mixed human and kangaroo DNA, but then the war finished and their creator Johnny Prophet defied orders and didn't poison them. Stupid gets busted by Angry for giving too much away.

The Rippers test JG and TG by sending them off to examine a WP shipment to see if it is carrying guns.

In order to get close enough to take survellience photos of the shipment, TG and JG pretend to be shooting a fashion calendar of WP men [HA! It's funny cause the men are really unattractive, but all think they are models and ... oh, who cares - more comic book pictures here too]. Although they do find guns on the shipment, Angry is convinced it is a trap and sends TG and JG to hijack the shipment.

TG uses her pimped up tank to take on the one truck hauling the shipment - JG is experiencing technical difficulties [which I guess was cheaper to film]. Despite firing a lot of bullets, TG only kills the WP men when she 1) hits one with an arrow and 2) throws the other from the top of the truck. Of course, the WP soliders fire back at her, but they shoot like stormtroopers at her completely unprotected body and she doesn't get hit.

TG gets control of the truck, but is headed towards a giant cliff and the brakes don't work [of course!]. She manages to unhook the truck cab from the trailer just in time so it doesn't go flying over the edge. Stupid also appears to stop TG from falling over the edge as well.

Back at base, the Rippers celebrate the successful hijacking with bad poetry and "praying", which entails lame dancing - also, we find out that the Rippers don't use the "corruption of guns" so will destroy the shipment. TG and JG join in the dancing - TG dances with Stupid, while JG dances with Horny [who dry humps her on the dance floor. Charming. Tell me, why are we meant to think it creepy when Small sexually harassed JG, but charmingly cornball when Horny does it?]

Sometime after this, TG and Stupid relax in a moment of what looks to be post-coital bliss [yick!] as Stupid tells her about how the water will one day return.

The Rippers open the boxes to find there are no guns and the body of Johnny Prophet. They start screaming and smashing stuff. [The movie plays this like it's major drama, but it's hard to get worked up over the death of someone who has been mentioned twice and shown in comic book form once. And that's IF you remember who Johnny Prophet is anyway - took me a few watches to connect some things together... but I could be stupid.]

Keslee is listening in on these screams and laughs to himself about it.

JG and TG organise an attack on WP - JG will fly the Rippers over the "mines [where] there is no way through" and bluff their way into the base in her WP jet (once repainted back to the old WP way); TG will drive her tank through [huh? They just mention an impenetrable minefield, and TG is just going to drive through it? Talk about a death exemption for being the hero of the movie... and probably a logic exemption as well...].

TG flies along on a parachute behind her tank. Her tank hits some mines but is unharmed [did the scriptwriter actually know how mines work?] while she accurately shoots down WP soldiers who attack her on the way. [And again, despite being a big juicy unprotected target, she still isn't hit by the large amount of hostile lead that comes flying in her direction.]

JG tries to get the Rippers to say the right things to bluff their way into the WP base over the radio, but Horny keeps komically blowing his lines [and he is meant to be the brainy, inventive Ripper...]. Eventually, JG gets angry and yells at WP Radio Control, who near instantly let the otherwise very suspiciously behaving craft land.

Keslee watches all of this on his all-seeing video monitor. [This scene contains a joke that you can't possibly get until after you watch the movie, which is another great symbol of how lame this script is. I'll explain below once Keslee's "secret" is revealed.]

Keslee has Sam stuck in the Pipe and then lets water trickle in so that she will "slowly drown".

Inside the base, the Rippers figure they are "toast" because they are so outnumbered [great plan there guys. Surely someone must have seen a flaw in having a mission briefing of:

1. Enter WP HQ.
2. ...
3. Victory!

But apparently not...]

In order to gain the advantage of darkness, Cool sacrifices himself to get access to the large, exposed, easily deactivated power sources for the base. The Rippers go on a rampage, fueled by seeing Cool die.

TG heads off to save Sam [why? IITS] but runs into Keslee. Keslee uses his metal arm to block TG's bullets and then, with TG at his mercy, monologues about how she's been bugged the entire time - "microphones all over your body". Before actually killing TG, Keslee stops to viciously attack some support wiring for the bridge they are on and TG uses the wiring to get the upper hand against him.

[Aside: The "microphones all over your body" line typifies how the movie tries to convince us that Keslee is some kind of evil genius who was in control the entire time, but it just doesn't work. "Tank Girl" is a movie where TG does a lot of random things simply because it's in the script (IITS) and it just all works out. Now that we are almost at the end of the movie, it feels like the lead bad guy was just shoehorned in at this point because we needed a bad guy to fight. Rather than feeling planned, it brings to mind the kid who goes, "I already knew that" to anything you tell them in an attempt to look smarter than they are. It just doesn't work.]

[Damn I'm bored with this movie. Switching to bullet point format in order to just get it done:]

• We find out Keslee's secret - he has a holographic head. [So where did his brain go? Actually, considering some of the decisions he's made, perhaps he was sitting on it the entire time...] Having a holographic head makes you invincible, apparently. Mainly because TG keeps trying to hit him in the head, when a good shot to anywhere else would do some damage.
• The Rippers make mincemeat of the WP soliders.
• The tank gets there just in time to save TG from Keslee.
• TG has a conversation with her tank (she talks; it flashes its lights and nods its main barrel - it's run out of ammo.
• Apparently electricity attracts metal, which means Keslee's arm can get stuck on an electrified grating.
• JG is now a crack shot with a handgun, meaning she can take out WP soldiers armed with automatic weapons easily.
• TG uses beer cans as substitute ammo to fire at Keslee. He uses his metal arm (now freed) to block them. [Sadly, this bit isn't the stupidest thing in this movie - that goes to the musical number.]
• Apparently no-one thought to water-proof a holographic head [which was the joke from before - Keslee, face obscured, takes a drink of water and you hear a buzzing sound that you also get here]. TG's tank knocks some water from a bucket onto Keslee, causing his head to short circuit a bit. TG sticks a water extractor into Keslee and we get a comic book shot of his death as water is sucked out of his body.
• TG rescues Sam just in time.
• JG is now a self-actualised woman who has shed her mousy persona and wears flattering clothes and make-up. She shoots Small for the past indignities she suffered at his hands.
• Sam and TG get cornered by WP soldiers... but these soldiers are under the command of Stupid and have no ammo [so why did they point their guns so aggressively, other than an IITS fake-out bit?]
• TG kisses Stupid, which sends everything animated. TG blows up the WP HQ which sends water everywhere. Now our heroes can go surfing.

And that's the end of that.

Why is it that so many mediocre comic-inspired movies have great soundtracks? "Tank Girl"'s soundtrack, coordinated by Courtney Love, is a great showcase of mid-90's alternative music. It's really the best part of the film, while at the same time making parts of the movie seem like a film clip.

And yes, "Tank Girl" is pretty mediocre. The one big plus is Lori Petty, who almost - almost - saves the film in the titular role. She's spunky and charismatic enough to pull off most of the iffy material she has to present. Petty manages to successfully carry the movie and, to me anyway, is likeable enough to make you overlook the character's annoying habits.

Everyone else is workman-like or worse. Malcolm McDowell picks up another paycheque playing his Malcolm McDowell Stock Evil Boss character. Naomi Watts isn't awful, but isn't that great either - it's good to see she put those years in the wilderness after "Tank Girl" into improving her range.

Where "Tank Girl" dies is that the movie doesn't know what it wants to be. There's too much violence for a quirky comedy, too much action for a comedy and not enough attention paid to sci-fi things for it to be a sci-fi film. It's such a grab bag of genres that perhaps it is no wonder it failed to grab people. There are a number of other issues in "Tank Girl" that maybe work against it - perhaps by trying to appeal to the widest audience the movie ends up leaving everyone unsatisfied, or not having the budget to do things properly, or by repeatedly using comic book panels that disrupt the visual flow of the movie - but in the end, whatever the reason, "Tank Girl" isn't that great a movie.

I've read a few Tank Girl TPBs and they were filled with hyper-kinetic violence, broad surrealism and an open sprinkling of sex. While I didn't really like what I read - it was pretty immature, in my opinion - I could certainly say it was distinctive and contained a female lead character who was her own boss. While "Tank Girl" the movie lucked out in getting Lori Petty to recapture the same sort of essence for her character, the rest of the movie is a weak sanitisation of the comic source.

Perhaps Tank Girl is one of those comic series that would never have worked on the big screen - a reader will accept a particular kind of visual non-sequiter on the page that viewer never will on screen, for instance, and Tank Girl was full of these - and the movie suffered for it.

Also, as I said at the start, Tank Girl wasn't a dull comic - every page held something taken to an extreme that would surprise the reader. This sensation sure as hell didn't make it to the cinematic adaption.

A mash of different movie genres that forms an unsatisfying whole of a movie. Lori Petty just about makes it enjoyable though.

For a film that tries so hard to be zany, it really doesn't come across as such. However, Malcolm MacDowell's ham, the Rippers, the use of comic book panels and animated sequences do add some cheese to the proceedings.

Date of review: 07 June 2006