Redline (2009)

Redline arrives from Madhouse with seven years of labor and something north of one hundred thousand hand-drawn frames behind it, and it spends every one of them on velocity. The plot concerns a daredevil named JP, an underground race held once every five years, a mafia fixer with a detonator, and a militant cyborg planet that would prefer the whole affair not happen over its airspace. This is a film that behaves like a pinball machine with a grudge. It has been a cult object since roughly the moment it failed at the box office, and its reputation rests on craft, not on message.

Sonoshee McLaren, the rival who becomes a partner, is competent, funny, and permitted to win races on her own merits. Her presence reads as a racing-genre convention, and the film never pauses to congratulate itself for it. The galaxy's population of aliens, robots, and assorted creatures is a design conceit borrowed from seventies comic art, not a statement about anything. The mafia boss, the bookmakers, and the Roboworld junta are obstacles in the path of a car. They exist to be outrun. A viewer hunting for a critique of wealth or power will find only a very tall biological weapon named Funky Boy, which is not a metaphor for anything.

The film offers spectacle instead, and it offers it without a single speech. The moral instruction here amounts to a man deciding not to detonate a bomb under his friend, an act of loyalty that the film treats as a punchline and a triumph in equal measure. There is no sermon, no lesson, no lecture. The engine noise drowns out anything resembling a thesis.