Tank Girl

Lori Petty gives her enough scrappiness on screen to make her a lot of fun to watch. When Tank Girl isn't playing like "Road Warrior" meets "La Femme Nikita," it plays like "The Crow" meets "The Brady Bunch," and it's the ultimate spring-break movie. [31 March 1995, p.57]

Lori Petty does a nice job in the title role of this enjoyable 1995 feature based on the postapocalyptic SF comic book and set in the year 2033; it's basically aimed at teenagers, though it's a lot more feminist than what usually passes for adult fare. Read full review

A glorious, spastic mess. Jamie Hewlett and Alan Martin's neo-underground cult comic book Tank Girl comes to life looking, amazingly, exactly like it ought to, positively overflowing with an ever-changing riot of color, gratuitous violence, inter-species shagging, toss-away one-liners, and gobs of little wonky bits that will either knock you upside the funny bone or leave you reeling from out-of-it confusion. Read full review

With a breakneck, don't-bother-to-stop-and-think-about-it pace, Tank Girl zips along for over one-hundred moments, only occasionally lapsing from its zaniness. Read full review

As a bratty, punked-up sci-fi romp crammed with pop- cult references (everything from Baywatch to Batman, Stiff Records to The Wizard of Oz), Tank Girl has energy to burn. [31 March 1995, p.3]

I found the sensory bombardment of Tank Girl ultimately numbing and at times had to fight to stay awake. But let's be fair: This isn't a film for people over 25. Or over 20, for that matter. Tank Girl is for teenagers, who will find something exuberant in its anarchic spirit as well as in its barrages of image. Teenagers are also sure to appreciate, probably more than adults would, the film's off-color humor. [31 March 1995, p.C3]

Sadly, despite its various attributes and overall funky MTV sensibilities, this never gets quite brutal or blockbusterish enough and the result is a movie both likely to offend the family and infuriate the aficionados in roughly equal amounts. Read full review

Since this is thoroughly tongue in cheek, Tank Girl has a likable brashness, even when breathless, pointless plotting threatens to eclipse the movie's charms. Chief among its strong points is Lori Petty, a buzz-cut fashion plate in a Prozac necklace, who brings the necessary gusto to Tank Girl's flippancy. Read full review

In making the transition from small page to big screen, Tank Girl gains very little and gives up nothing. Working from a generally faithful script by Teri Sarafian, director Rachel Talalay opts for an approach that emphasizes surface and flash at the expense of depth and coherence -- much like its source. The result is a bracing film that's halfway between a string of MTV videos (Courtney Love put together the edgy soundtrack) and some of that network's over-the-top cartoons. [31 March 1995, p.D07]

Whatever the faults of Tank Girl, lack of ambition is not one of them. Read full review

Tank Girl - a slapdash but lively film based on the underground comic of the same name - takes militant feminism of the "Thelma & Louise" school and weds it to the punk nihilism of the "Mad Max" school. Actually, given Tank Girl's personality - sassy, sexy and gun-savvy - "weds" is probably the wrong verb. Read full review

The plot is incoherent and jumpy and the dialogue weak. Scriptwriter Tedi Sarafian makes the same mistake his brother Doran made in his movie "Gunmen." It's all effects and nonstop action, as if that can cover for one-dimensional characters. [30 March 1995]

If any of this screams "cheap Generation X marketing ploy," you're right on the money. [31 March 1995, p.5G]

Every decade needs a nonsensical sci-fi space oddity - a Barbarella or Buckaroo Banzai - to keep the underground element amused. Tank Girl should keep the Internet clicking for a while, with its imposing strangeness and violent pop-apocalyptic action. [1 Apr 1995, p.2B]

Instead of hip, though, Tank Girl is prefab and purified, a calculated cult attraction. It's Danger by Mattel, and Petty, in her ripped stockings and torpedo bra, is a cyber-Barbie. This is one chick flick that at least has bite. Too bad its teeth are false. [3 Apr 1995, p.4D]

Petty, though, is the only reason to see this coy and scrappy comic-book adventure-a trash bin of sci-fi detritus. Read full review

How well you'll tolerate this utterly unhinged quasi-feminist comic book fantasy depends on your Lori Petty threshold. As the title character--a smartass riot grrrl who rolls through a fanciful postapocalyptic landscape in a tank, occasionally pausing to snuggle and bicker with her mutant kangaroo boyfriend (Ice-T) -- Petty's onscreen virtually nonstop, and her hyperkinetic mugging, jerking, whining, and sassing wears thin after a while. Read full review

A classic case of kitchen-sink filmmaking, in which the principals have thrown everything into the stew, hoping enough will stick to the audience...What’s missing from the mix is an engaging story to bind together its intriguing bits. And Lori Petty as Tank Girl, aka Rachel Buck, has the spunk but, sadly, not the heart of the post-apocalyptic heroine. Read full review

It's a distraction: a buzz in your head that won't go away. [31 March 1995, p.HI]

Generous souls may try to blame this travesty of the Deadline comic-strip on the studio execs who forced director Talalay to tone down and re-edit her cut. But what remains of Petty's anodyne sexless heroine and the dull, episodic live-action sequences suggests we may have been spared something worse even than this movie. Read full review

Watching Tank Girl is as disorienting as waking up in someone else's bad dream. You want to get out as fast as possible, but all the exits seem to be blocked. Read full review

A lifeless pop vision of the future that tries too self-consciously to be irreverent, hip and cutting edge. Read full review

Sure Tank Girl has a lot of energy but then so does a Pixie Stix-addled eleven-year-old screaming in your ear about the intricacies of Pokemon for hours at a time during a cross-country road trip. That doesn't mean either ordeal should be experienced by any reasonable human except perhaps as a form of torture. Read full review