Riding the Bullet

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The only way that the plot can work is if the entire movie didn't actually happen. Monster A-Go-Go, anyone?

Riding the Bullet isn't so much a movie as it is an argument against outlining your screenplay. The only way any of this can possibly make sense is if Alan climbed into his bathtub at the beginning of the film, took enough PCP to tranquilize a rhinoceros, hallucinated the next ninety minutes, eventually sobered up, got a job, lived an aggressively ordinary life, and then, decades later, turned to the camera for a Forrest Gump-style epilogue. That's the only version of events that even remotely holds together. Otherwise, you're left trying to connect scenes that appear to have been shuffled like a deck of cards before filming.

The movie lurches from supernatural horror to psychological drama to roadside ghost story without ever committing to what it's actually about. Characters drift in and out, bizarre encounters pile up without consequence, and every revelation somehow raises more questions than it answers. Rather than building mystery, it simply abandons the idea that events should have causes or effects. Watching Riding the Bullet feels less like unraveling a puzzle and more like trying to remember a dream someone else had after taking expired cold medicine.

Then comes the finale, which somehow manages to make everything even worse. Alan spends years living a completely mundane life before asking the audience, "When it's your time, will you ride the bullet?" That's... not a philosophical question. It's literally asking whether, when it's time for you to die, you'll die. Well... yes. We all will. It's not an optional side quest. The film spends nearly two hours building toward what it thinks is a profound meditation on mortality, only to land on the cinematic equivalent of asking, "When you get hungry, will you eat food?"

That may actually make Riding the Bullet unique. It's the rare rhetorical movie. Not a movie that asks rhetorical questions—a movie whose entire existence is rhetorical. It's constructed as though it's supposed to provoke an emotional response, but not one you're actually capable of having because none of it means anything. The plot doesn't exist, the message doesn't exist, and by the time the credits roll, you're left wondering if you imagined the whole thing. Frankly, that breaks my cardinal rule of movie - if you made me watch your 90+ minute boreathon and then tell me it didn't actually happen, you get 0 stars because you're not a movie. BOO!!!

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