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100Turns out to be the most unnerving film of the year. Easy.
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90If you're looking to have your nerves fried and your pulse pounded, this is your ticket to ride.
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90Redoubtably hilarious as always, Zahn also lends his character unpredictable flashes of anger, pathos, and faint psychosis, even when the movie jumps the median from ticklishly discomfiting black comedy into by-the-numbers horror jolts.
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90Terrific escapist fare, stylish, outrageous and compelling.
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90Climb into this rig and you'll be sweating bullets.
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88There is a kind of horror movie that plays so convincingly we don't realize it's an exercise in pure style. ''Halloween'' is an example, and John Dahl's Joy Ride is another.
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88The potential for action never lets up; you never know what's coming around the next corner.
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88A horror film that doesn't wear out a moment of its welcome.
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83Zigzags across the conventions of genre, occasionally driving on the shoulders of black humor -- it's a road movie for the way we process suspense today.
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83Skillfully crafted, flawlessly paced, intellectually challenging tension of classics like "Bad Day at Black Rock."
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80The kicker is that Joy Ride is funny, too. In fact, it would be a superbly frightening entertainment if not for the way Dahl fixates, disturbingly, on sadistic details.
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80Director John Dahl ("Red Rock West," "The Last Seduction") has a pronounced knack for snap reversals and out-of-the-blue shocks.
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80Hot-wired, white-knuckle thriller.
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80In noir, everybody's guilty, and that's one of the pleasures of Joy Ride. The three youngsters aren't exactly innocent.
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The director, John Dahl, has no intention to baffle or obscure; his objective is to scare the living daylights out of you, or, more pertinently, the dying headlights.
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75There's good pulp and bad pulp, and for most of its duration, Joy Ride is quality stuff.
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75Joy Ride is also surprisingly funny, thanks mostly to Zahn.
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75Joy Ride is plenty spooky but there's also plenty of comic relief -- mostly from the perennially goofy Zahn.
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75Some of the plot twists don't really stand up to close scrutiny, but the sometimes over-the-top Joy Ride plows through them with such joyful glee, you don't really care.
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75A really satisfying suspenser, but also really, really fun.
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75It's a snazzy, smartly made, and even hip little scarefest. As a jump-start to Halloween, it's all you could hope for.
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70Much more effectively terrifying than the usual overplotted, underwritten Hollywood thriller.
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70There's plenty of scary pleasure to be had from this clever, compact thriller.
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70Manages to be both astoundingly derivative and reasonably entertaining at the same time.
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63Even at its best, Ride never survives its shaky opening hook.
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60Pure, irrational, claustrophobic, gritty, unpretentious.
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60The sequel-ready twist at the end is a letdown, but until then this is a neatly constructed nail-biter.
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60Despite its few flaws, Joy Ride does take viewers on one hell of a ride. It's one of those rare films that manages to take an overused plot and breathe some sort of creativity into it.
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60At some point in this endless thriller the suspense turns into an extremely unpleasant ordeal that Dahl doesn't know when to stop.
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50Dahl, who really does know what he's doing when it comes to investing a scene with both heebies and jeebies, is a notch or two above most.
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42The picture is pinched and predictable. Even with the immensely talented Steve Zahn, an actor who's known to steal scenes and, sometimes, save pictures, the movie is a yawn.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 31 out of 36
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Mixed: 3 out of 36
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Negative: 2 out of 36
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snekir.7Brilliant (also their official cite) but it is litlle predictive.