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Rating: I'm on a highway to Hell...
What you're on is not a highway, but you can bet on the Hell part.
It's one of those desolate and isolated American routes that cut through forgotten places in the heart of mother America. When the weather is good, you can see miles into the horizon: hard asphalt flanked by decrepit gas stations, pale and anonymous villages or shacks scorched by the relentless desert sun and shaken by perpetual winds. You can relax, rest assured that a road like this will lead you to where you need to go. Go ahead and nap, this is one of those nice straight roads, a metaphor for what life is like in this wonderful country.
All of this until it starts raining. The rare times when water hits the ground, it seems like the Great Plumber forgot to turn off the faucet. Visibility drops to zero, attention must rise to a state of semi-emergency, and the risk of finding yourself off-road, bogged down, is very high. It's in this situation that the doors to your personal Hell will fling open.
A blurry figure on the roadside. A thumb raised in a hopeful stop sign, please stop brother... The foot unconsciously tapping the brake. Mama says it's always wrong to pick up hitchhikers, but if she says so, then surely it must be right, and with this bad weather, it hardly matters wondering what this poor man is doing alone, lost in the arse end of Nowhereland.
A raincoat covering his features, his face. And when, once seated, Mr. Raincoat removes his hood, you may already realize that you've punched your personal one-way ticket to Beelzebub's House.
The eyes... Mother Nature shouldn't allow eyes of that color to exist... An icy blue, penetrating, hypnotizing. Well done, you need to look away. Look ahead, look at the damn road that has handed you this nice surprise for the last day of your miserable life. It's normal to talk to a stranger about random things. Absolutely not when you ask who he is, and he replies that he's a killer...
"...that's what the other guy said too" "Which other?" "The one who gave me a ride before you, but he couldn't get far" "And why's that?" "Because I cut off his legs, arms, and head, and now I'll do the same to you...
Terrible, cruel, understanding, and lucid, John Ryder, that's his name (real or fake, it doesn't matter), has a mission: to transform you from a harmless kitten into a predatory tiger. Because you may run, hide, but he will always find you, oh, you can rest assured he will find you. You have only one way to rid yourself of him... Call the police? Come on, Jimmy boy, aren't you so mundane? No, Jimmy, you have to take him out with your own hands, sully yourself with his blood, share for even just a moment the ecstasy of crazed red blood cells spraying from veins and staining your pretty face. Will that accomplish anything, Jim? Maybe yes, maybe no. Perhaps you'll carry a bit of that lucid madness with you forever. Perhaps you are the worst victim and not the survivor of Ryder's cravings.
And when your hands, stained with his blood, are cleaned, you can bask in resuming your journey. And remember who you were before and who you are now. Everything else you will lose, as this road is lost in the heart of this America or, more simply, as that film said... like tears in the rain...
"The Hitcher" is the natural offspring of Spielberg's famous debut, "Duel". A thriller plot lent to the most classic road movie setup: a coast-to-coast to deliver a car. Evil doesn't have the weight and power of a trailer truck but the noble features of Rutger Hauer, the unforgettable android Roy in "Blade Runner", here in the role of the serial killer John Ryder. Monumental is Hauer's performance, an actor too often snubbed, perhaps forever imprisoned in these two roles. Hauer literally steals the scene. Such is his performance that almost immediately one sympathizes with the terrible serial killer, almost blurring the roles of the good guy (Jim Halsey, played by Tomas Howell) with that of the bad guy.
John Ryder represents, if you will, the vegetarian version of Hannibal Lecter. His intelligence, his detachment, his cold irony have the ability to confuse what his real intentions are as well as what the role of the villain in a thriller should be. He doesn't just harm, but on the scene of his misdeeds, he sets up a rave party.
In an era of metaphysical potboilers with a paranormal-psychological character, this film could easily be labeled as "outdated". One might easily believe that the new frontiers of suspense must be sought in deliberate pauses and reflections, but here no one wants to be the turn-taking Mereghetti, and when a film like this glues you from the first to the last minute to the screen, stupefied, with your popcorn now stale, it means that perhaps those new frontiers have yet to be drawn.
Intense from start to finish. A classic.
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