Tank Girl (1995) Misunderstood 90s disaster plays brilliantly thirty years later

The 4D experience of Rachel Talalay’s Tank Girl isn’t exactly something to recommend. Imagine waking up in the morning, attempting to perform one’s first evacuation (a Number One, thankfully) and ablution of the day, only to discover the water supply of your entire local area is off. Then find yourself popping on a 90s cult classic while you wait for the world to go back to normal, only to discover that the world of the film you’re about to enter hasn’t had a drop of rain in 11 years and society has devolved into a Mad Max/Dune-style punk apocalypse. Suddenly, the high-camp bubblegum box office bomb doesn’t seem too farfetched, and the leftover kettle water from yesterday’s cup of tea feels like a blessing from down on high.

Without that experience, Tank Girl boils down to an extremely fun debacle. Adapted from Jamie Hewlett and Alan Martin’s Deadline comic book series, it was another gamble for United Artists who had previously tanked an entire subdivision of their company with Heaven’s Gate a decade and a half earlier, throwing $25 million at a free-spirited property that would either sink or swim depending on the mood of its audience. Following the effervescent punk heroine Rebecca ‘Tank Girl’ Buck (Lori Petty on incendiary form) after her capture by the villainous Water & Power (and no, before you gutter-minded Gen-Zs get there, it’s not abbreviated to WAP), Tank Girl is paced and delivered like the world’s most expensive sit-com, taking episodic digressions to futuristic brothels, evil lairs and mutant kangaroo dens. Joined by downtrodden mechanic Jet (an early role for Naomi Watts), their quest to save surrogate sister Sam (Stacy Linn Ramsower) is continually thwarted by arch-bastard Kesslee (Malcolm McDowell in insane scenery-chewing-mode), and the high-stakes battle for water becomes a slapstick cartoon of marvelously silly proportions.

Tank Girl’s cartoonishness is a trait that is expressed very literally in places. Although a fairly expensive-looking film in places, Talalay’s choice to use panels from the comic books themselves as amusing inserts is both a feature and a bug. At their best, these multimedia touches give the sufficient zip, zap and pow mostly missing from modern comic book cinema, because, well, when was the last time a big-budget live-action blockbuster slavishly evoked its source material to a tee? Talalay and co. put the original artists front and centre to interesting effect, especially given that the artwork occasionally eclipses the expressiveness of the film itself. Ending with an explosive animated sequence that gives a taste of what a Tank Girl anime may have looked like is a bittersweet move, capping off the film on a giddy high while also completely abandoning the grounded thrills of such an otherwise well-mounted production. Hewlett and Martin’s work also operates as a strange crutch in places, providing cutaways to things the budget wouldn’t stretch to, and, perhaps more bafflingly, references to comic panel designs that resemble nothing close to their live-action counterparts. Slamming the two worlds of Tank Girl together reaps some fruit in places, yet otherwise falls flat on its face in trying to marry an ambitious production with its limitless world on the page.

Thank goodness, then, for Lori Petty. Like Gwen Stefani with the voice of Betty Boop, her Tank Girl is the film’s tuning fork, forever unserious and devilishly rebellious as she flirts, fights and fools her way through the brutal world of 2023 (chalk this up as another sci-fi film our depressing reality has somehow survived). Margot Robbie is substantially indebted to Petty’s Tank Girl performance, embodying the same anarchic spirit and East Coast drawl as her now-iconic take (and now, by default, most beloved live-action version in the woeful wake of Joker: Folie à Deux) on Harley Quinn. One could even say Rebecca’s persistent irreverence, apparent indestructibility and oddly specific pop culture references could be a precursor to Ryan Reynold’s Deadpool, but, once again, better. Petty is, in the best way, off in her own little world, giving it 100% while also understanding the assignment completely, bouncing off Watts’ mousey Jet (later, Jet Girl, of course) in a boundary-pushing ‘are they best friends…or something more?’ dynamic that feels especially fresh in 1995. Smaller appearances from character actors clad in surprisingly well-textured kangaroo make-up (including Ice-T and Reg E. Cathey) make an impression too, even if they are completely blown out of the water by Malcolm McDowell, an actor who has never been seen not to be having fun. Starting as a psychotic suit with a high-tech lair and ending as a robo-armed, hologram-headed cybernetic nightmare, he is camp incarnate, relishing every silly monologue with slice upon slice of ham and a good helping of cheese too. He’s introduced by shoving a water extractor into some poor sap of a middleman’s back and drinking his fluids like he’s a crisp bottle of Buxton, and his performance somehow gets more absurd with every scene after. An unhinged role for a British national treasure, part of Tank Girl’s reappraisal should heavily involve McDowell’s status here as one of the most entertaining villains of the 90s.

In many respects, this and Waterworld are two sides of the same coin. Despite one having plentiful water and the other distinctly lacking in the wet stuff, both are strong examples of 1995 sci-fi flops that shot for the moon and were immediately ignored by audiences and critics alike, and also one of the final times big studios would take risks on wacky material like this with big, practical production design (in Tank Girl’s case, impressively mounted by Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke). Arrow waved the flag for Waterworld with their bells-and-whistles 4K edition recently, and Eureka are following suit with Tank Girl; the breadth and passion of this restoration and retrospective is absolutely what this expensive, scrappy oddity deserves. If this release proves anything, you can’t keep a good Tank Girl down.

Simon’s Archive – Tank Girl (1995)