Joy Ride (2001)

	Directed by: John Dahl	COUNTRY USA GENRE Road/Thriller NORWEGIAN TITLE Joy Ride RUNNING TIME 97 minutes
	Produced by: J. J. Abrams Chris Moore
	Written by: Clay Tarver J. J. Abrams

Cast includes:
CHARACTER	ACTOR/ACTRESS	RATING
Lewis Thomas	Paul Walker	½
Fuller Thomas	Steve Zahn
Venna Wilcox	Leelee Sobieski
Charlotte Dawson	Jessica Bowman	-
Rusty Nail	Matthew Kimbrough	-
Rusty Nail (voice)	Ted Levine	-

Review

Director John Dahl (The Last Seduction, Rounders) has a penchant for tingling atmosphere and setups, and in Joy Ride he creates a rather simmering concoction that plays like a crossbreed between Duel, Smokey and the Bandit, and The Hitcher. The film invites you into an era at the boundary between CB radios and full connectivity, which incidentally was also an era in which a 16-year-old Leelee Sobieski could be cast as 26-year-old Paul Walker's romantic interest. The above gives the film a charge and grounds its world of menace and inscrutability. In the end, Joy Ride isn’t able to maintain the same level of thematic precision or purity as its sources of inspiration, but Dahl's assured style and the actors' level-headed performances lift the film a tad above the sum of its parts.