The indominable nature of the human spirit is matched in its sublimity only by when lots of things are on fire and everybody is running around panic-shitting themselves because they have no idea why so many things are on fire and they’re afraid they might be on fire, too.

Gone in 60 Seconds (1974)

Smart people are a waste of time. Ohhh, look, look at the fancy boy, everyone: planning ahead, vaguely knowing what he’s doing, understanding that actions have consequences and that explosions are fundamentally dangerous and probably shouldn’t be the organizing principle of your day. Get bent, fancy boy! Your brain bores me.

Gone in 60 Seconds is a movie in the purest sense, because it’s literally just a guy pointing cameras at the thing that makes him happy, and that thing is vroom, vrooooooom. There is no consideration of audience, or basic storytelling principles, because those things don’t go vroom, vrooooooom. If you’re not into cars, fires, motorcycles, explosions, abject confusion, cars, fires, and then explosions again, you’re in the wrong theatre, dude. This is a crazy person showing you his home-movie footage.

This film forgets to have a plot for long stretches – wait, let me try that again: this film doesn’t give a shit about having a plot for long stretches. The closing credits give the game away – it’s just footage of H.B. Halicki driving around really fucking fast with the name of the movie written on the side of his car. That’s all he wanted to do. The movie part was entirely incidental. I wish I was smart enough to just fucking trick people into watching me drive a car in circles for hours.

H.B. Halicki had a goddamn vision, and he wasn’t going to let common sense or basic survival instinct stop him from achieving it.

The End

A movie is two different things: a work of art and/or entertainment, and a look into the mind of its maker. Which one of those things interests you more depends mostly on whether or not that filmmaker was insane. The answer in this case is obvious: we have seen into H.B. Halicki’s mind, and it’s mostly just the sound of engines revving.

Idiots will literally kill themselves their own amusement, and God bless them for it. Anybody who would rather be on fire than be bored should have a hospital named after them. There should be a Nobel Prize for property damage.