RPM would seem to be a rip-off of Bruckheimer's ridiculous Gone In 60 Seconds, until you realize that it was made three years earlier but didn't generate any attention (and for good reason) until Gone In 60 Seconds came out, and hardly even then. David Arquette is spectacularly miscast as a car thief who steals cars not for the money, but for the rush (and for the all but pulsating cliché) because, he believes, all the right things end up with the wrong people. That turns out to be true in RPM, since there are such a wide variety of beautiful cars getting stolen from complete morons. One man, for instance, meets Famke Janssen's Claudia on some remote mountain road, attempts to get her drunk on his champagne (on the shoulder of the road, of course, not at home or anything), and then she ties him up and steals his car in front of his very eyes. He is, as would any thinking person, completely incapable of removing his own belt from around his ankles (or even thinking to do this) in order to save his precious car. He doesn't deserve it anyway.
We learn early on that Luke (David Arquette) has a way of getting around the police, since his father is able to pull some strings with them (mainly with his massive checkbook), which he does only because Luke keeps coming up with cool little gizmos that make him a lot of money but that he uses to help him in his stealing adventures. There is a particularly belligerent scene early in the film where a female officer comes to arrest him, and he sneaks out of the building and casually flees the scene in her cruiser, with the siren on. Because that's the safest way to escape, of course. IN a police car. With the SIREN on. Let the forehead slapping begin, but don't get your palm too sore yet, it gets much better.
The plot of the film is a pathetically thin spider-webby clothesline of a thing that is barely strung together with a lot of awful, awful scenes, each seeming to try to outdo the last. I've seen James Bond do a wheelie in the cab of an 18-wheeler, and I just about fell out of my chair at the stupidity of THAT, but it's WAY outdone here. Luke is in Nice, France (evidently for no other reason than to pack the film with bad accents), with the hopes of stealing the greatest discovery in automotive history (the RPM, which runs on a gasless engine), and after stealing a Bond-style car, he makes a quick stop on the side of the road to rescue a damsel in distress from some street punks (which he does just as casually as if he were picking up a friend who was waiting for him). As he's running from the police for stealing the car, he drives UP the side of a tunnel, and lands it on the roof of an oncoming big rig (commenting, `I haven't done this in a long time.') This is, all joking aside, a serious contender for the most jaw-droppingly ridiculous thing I've ever seen in a movie in my LIFE.
Later, Claudia goes to steal a fancy red car, and after flirting with it's idiot owner, she decides that, instead of ditching her Jeep and jumping into the sports car, she'll just grab the wheel and drive away with both of them. Yeah, you know how sometimes people will ride a bike and hold onto the handlebars of a second one? Evidently this can be done with cars, too. It makes you wonder if anyone read the script before the movie went into production, or if anyone actually watched the sad, belligerent mess that it became before they released it. Cars are hard things to push, I've done it. For the most part, they're pretty heavy machines. But I suppose that in some mythical world where the police jump off of their motorcycles and into moving vehicles before those vehicles show any signs of attempting to escape and where mechanics slide under the cars they're working on feet first, women as skinny as Claudia can push a car while driving another car and only holding it by the steering wheel.
Arquette simply cannot handle the role that he is given in this movie. An ever present cigarette is not enough to make him able to play a hardened criminal, he's too much of a lovable goofball. This may be, by the way, how he can steal a car, get caught by it's naked female owner, and turn her into a car thief as well the same day, and then convince her to help him steal the RPM. In one of the most laughable lines in the film, he informs the audience, `The place was like Fort Knox, holding the biggest automotive breakthrough in history. I was gonna have to be good.' Well, luckily for him, the replica of Fort Knox was of the kind that doesn't notice low-flying aircraft dropping off red-flag car thieves wearing bright blue jumpsuits and cute white roller-blades, unconscious guards laying just outside the wide-open main entrance and, my favorite, that employs technicians and mechanics that flee the scene like frightened cattle when the lights go out, leaving the greatest breakthrough in automotive history alone with a couple of car thieves that have made their way into the central vault with little to no difficulty whatsoever. It's amazing no one has tried to attack the real Fort Knox after watching this, if it's that easy to get into.
(spoilers) RPM is a bad movie that is not likeable as a bad movie, the way films like Death Race 2000 are. This is not enjoyable camp, it's ridiculous garbage. The prize for stealing the RPM is a ludicrous one billion dollars, but of course when he's close to getting the money, Luke decides that it would be cute to demand TWO billion dollars (which he demands in true Dr. Evil form, except without any sense of amusement and, luckily, without holding his pinky to his mouth). There is, of course, the obligatory idiot romance, which turns out to be with the woman who caught him stealing her Viper, but also the suggestion that there is a frustrated romance between Luke and Claudia (who later turn out to be brother and sister). Just after all of the mechanics flee the RPM like scared children, Claudia asks Luke why they can't ever be close, and he responds with a line the grammatical correctness of which reflects the sheer lack of intelligence in the rest of the movie.
`Because every time I turn my back on you, you stole everything I ever had.'
