I admit that I walked into this movie thinking it was going to be dumb. I thought that Christine was one of Stephen King's weaker novels (and John Carpenter's movie version was similarly weak), but I tried to be as open-minded as possible. The first third of the movie, which is mysterious and interesting, was enough to make me think that perhaps some of the reviews on here were a bit too harsh. The score is also quite good, and it's used to great effect in the movie. Once the movie starts in earnest, however, it becomes formulaic and boring, though it picks up again near the climax.
The director did the French cult movie Malefique, which I liked, but it essentially boiled down to Hellraiser in a jail cell with painfully, self-consciously quirky characters. This movie dispenses with the overly quirky characters to give you somewhat bland and generic characters, thanks to the dismal writing of Benjamin Carr (the genius responsible for writing Thirteen Ghosts, Hellraiser: Deader, and a whole slew of Charles Band movies). Though the actors infuse their characters with some personality, none of them are particularly memorable or even interesting. There's a bit of pointless, filler back story on some of them, but, really, they're just meant to be nameless, forgettable fodder for a killer car. It's unfortunate that the scenes involving characterization or back story feel like filler, because I think the actors could have done some pretty decent performances given better material. Still, for a low budget movie about a car that eats people, the performances were credible. The nice guys were likable and the douchebags were appropriately unlikeable.
The real problem I had with this movie (besides the concept of a car that eats people, of course), was that it just gets plain *boring* near the middle. Humans bicker over who the leader is. Killer car makes ominous growling noises as it sneaks up on them. Humans scatter and run for their lives. Killer car chases after them -- though not driving fast enough to quite run them down -- until the scene drags on for several minutes. Repeat several times. It's just not very interesting.
After the killer car has eaten a few people, pruning down the cast, the pacing gets a bit better and the action scenes become a bit more interesting. Unfortunately, the low budget CGI comes to the forefront here, whereas it was previously used somewhat sparingly. For the apparent budget, the CGI isn't all that bad, but if you're used to something like James Cameron's Avatar, I think you'll be a bit disappointed.
I don't think this movie quite deserves its 3.x rating, but it's definitely not something that I'd recommend to casual horror/thriller fans. For junkies like me, it's enjoyable enough for a watch, as long as you're not too demanding.
