BRIMMING WITH ’80S NOSTALGIA
Turbo Kid a Mad Max on BMXes
Turbo Kid feels a bit like watching ’80s Saturday-morning toy commercials — if your sugary cereal’s complete breakfast included a healthy spritzing of arterial blood. It’s Mad Max on BMX, boyhood imagination given a healthy production budget. It’s a miles-deep nostalgia playground whose favourite part of the ’80s was the practical effects, especially the ones that involved fountains of sloppy gore.
It opens with a voice-over introducing us to the post-apocalyptic world of 1997, a ruined wasteland beset by acid rain and recovering from the robot revolution. The Kid (Munro Chambers) rides through this grungy junkyard trying to scrounge up whatever remains of society, looking for bitchin’ power ballads he can play on his Walkman and anything he can trade for bottles of water and occasional comics.
The Kid skirts the edges of what remains of humanity, equally wary of the cowboy likes of Frederic the Arm Wrestler (Aaron Jeffery) and the warlord Zeus (Michael Ironside), who has a penchant for making people fight to the death before feeding them into a blender that extracts their precious bodily water content.
Perhaps it’s just because I don’t like to share BuzzFeed lists about things only (whatever decade) kids will really understand, but there’s an extent to which the laser-focused nostalgia is actually a bit airless and restrictive, forcing The Kid onto a path of silly, weightless violence.
The saving role comes in the outright commitment of everyone involved, not the least of which the people who designed this world, a gloriously bustedup-and-taped-together fantasia of skeleton-masked bad guys shooting buzz saws off their hands, garden gnomes wielded as deadly weapons and bicycles turned into nightmare bully machines. The potential toy line alone is a high-five to the platonic ideal of a 10-year-old boy.
The movie is basically a long excuse to string together set pieces that show off these various production designs, helped along by remarkably game actors.
The best of these is Ironside, who finds a perfect pitch between serious and ridiculous. But the most delightfully unhinged is Laurence Leboeuf as The Kid’s eventual travelling partner; playing an over-eager friend robot, she’s like an electrified candy necklace, bopping around with a permanently plastered-on manic grin and the naive excitement of a puppy on amphetamines. She’s mostly there to get into trouble and get rescued by The Kid, but her exhilaratingly odd wavelength makes a pretty convincing case for her continued rescue. And she’s also a pretty good stand-in for the film’s appeal: to watch what happens when people go full hog.
There isn’t a lot of anything to latch onto in Turbo Kid beyond warm nostalgia, but there’s something to be said for gripping hold of even a flimsy premise and squeezing it until it explodes in a flurry of goopy blood.