Turbo Kid | Movie Review

Nostalgia is a fickle beast. Get it right by reminding the audience of those blissful years-gone-by and people will adore your name while shouting your brilliance to the masses. Get it wrong, and you’re Michael Bay. Trying to make a movie that FEELS nostalgic – as if it were actually filmed in whatever time frame you’re revering – well, that is a completely different monster, and one that is almost never successful. So if I told you that “Turbo Kid” is basically “Mad Max” if it were made in 1983 by a teenage gamer high on copious amounts of New Coke and Pop Rocks, you’d probably already be shaking your head in disappointment. Well, lift that chin up, Buckaroo Banzai, because “Turbo Kid” is exactly that…and it gets it right.

The year is 1997. The Kid (Munroe Chambers) is a young scavenger with a tortured past cruising through a post-apocalyptic world on his BMX bike, in search of water and historical trinkets. Like all of us watching, The Kid is fascinated with the past. After he comes across the most insanely peppy girl on the planet in the form of Apple (a blissfully energetic Laurence Leboeuf), a romance blossoms and it seems The Kid’s years of solitude have finally come to an end.

Of course, these movies are pointless without some egomaniacal water baron running around torturing peasants for entertainment, and for that we have Michael Ironside’s Zeus. As the two worlds between The Kid and Zeus inevitably collide, our hero dons the garb of his favorite comic-book character to retaliate (including a Nintendo Power Glove with Mega Man properties apparently) and an epic showdown is a foregone conclusion.

On Zeus’ side, we’ve got enough “Mad Max” extras to take care of “Fury Road” 2, 3 and probably a new Waterworld trilogy, all led by a maniacal butcher with an Iron Maiden mask and a buzz-saw for an arm. In The Kid’s corner, we have an Indiana Jones clone – in our introduction, he even essentially arm-wrestles Mola Ram – who goes by the name of Frederic (Aaron Jeffery) and kicks ass in that special last-generation action hero mix of bravura and clenched cheekbones.

If the 80’s had a temporal door we could walk through and be instantly transported into one of those theaters playing films like “Trancers” or “I Come In Peace”, I think it’s pretty safe to say we would also find the adventures of The Kid coming soon. The trifecta writing and directing crew of Francois Simard, Anouk Whissell, and Yoann-Karl Whissell, know EXACTLY the tone they want, and they hit every note as pure as a Broadway pianist. From the barren landscapes, to the Carpenter-esque score, loving nods to games and movies of the time, and even to the obscenely ludicrous geysers of blood accompanying the numerous decapitations – These guys nailed it.

Is “Turbo Kid” for everyone? Absolutely not. There is enough cheese here to keep Wisconsin content for a millennium, enough gore and dispatched limbs to confuse you into thinking Sam Raimi directed this in his heyday, and enough nods to a long-lost era to remind certain audience members that they’re really, really old. Those are either compliments or critiques – depending on how open you are to a movie like this – but make no mistake, this 80’s buffet is an acquired taste.

For me? “Turbo Kid” is a visual time-capsule of joy for those of us that revel in reliving the past. Every actor commits to their own absurdity, and the directors treat the film not as some jokey mishmash of ideas or mockery, but as a loving tribute to the B-movie kitsch of another time. Of my time.

Like “The Guest” did last year, “Turbo Kid” reminds us that – ever so often – it’s ok to go home again.

Aaron Peterson
The Hollywood Outsider