Freeway

Posted by Vicki on 02.10.03

When I was five, Alice in Wonderland summed up the world for me. The good-natured twistedness of the characters combined with surreal situations were entrancing. Since then, film adaptations of dark fairy tales have always appealed on some level; many have even be super. Regretfully the same can not be said of 'Freeway'.

The plot claimed it was a dark contempory version of Little Red Riding Hood, though it seemed more akin to the 'Jerry Springer Show' on a bad day. Reese Witherspoon plays Vanessa, a white trash runaway who has bad taste in clothes and the men she accepts lifts from. Keifer Sutherland palys the big bad wolf's human incarnation, imaginitively called Bob Wolferton.

The use of the word "streetwise" to describe Vanessa on the back of the video box should probably have set alarm bells ringing, but I was too innocent to realise how tacky the film could be. To be honest, Vanessa is not an overly sympathetic character. Witherspoon plays the role with the same innane cheerfulness that she uses in 'Legally Blonde', which given she is meant to be an abused killer (admittedly in self-defense) is a little bit confusing.

While the whole white trash act gets a little overdone towards the end, with even her dreams of her grandmother's santuary being of a gaudy trailor decorated by inflatable animals and clowns, the film was generally enjoyable. It is with the final freezeshot that the feeling of having been cheated sets in. In the same way that Cradle of Filth videos are often shock horror for the sake of it, 'Freeway' came across as trying a little too hard to convey Vanessa's heart of gold beneath the tough girl act.

The morals of the story are that acting classes can be useful, and never trust a man with patches on the elbows of his jacket.