I’ve heard that Rutger Hauer was the inspiration for the vampire Lestat. I’m sure that someday I’ll watch some of his older films and that will make sense. But as it stands, the Rutger Hauer I know is a growling badass, not a charming French aristocrat.
The Hitcher doesn’t really have the usual pace of a Hollywood movie. It’s like someone decided to skip over the entire first act of the film and just cut to the conflict. John Rhyder (Hauer) is hitchhiking, and a tired motorist named Jim Halsey (C. Thomas Howell) picks him up. We’re less than 10 minutes into the film when Rhyder has told Jim that he killed the last man to pick him up, and that intends to do the same thing to Jim.
Less than 15 minutes have passed when Jim, with a knife to his face, pushes Rhyder out of the car and drives away. From this point on the movie has a single mission: to find a way to keep bringing Rhyder into conflict with Jim. There’s exactly one further encounter that makes any sense; Rhyder is in a car with a family, still on the same road. They pass Jim, and Jim tries to warn them.
After this encounter, Rhyder kills the family, gets a truck and chases Jim with it, destroys a gas station, slips into a diner and leaves a severed finger in Jim’s French fries, plants a bloody knife in Jim’s pocket, steals his wallet, unlocks his jail cell, and freely commits numerous murders while framing Jim for all of them. The only person who believes him is Nash (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a waitress he meets trying to gain access to a phone. I could complain that he later encounters her again in an implausible way, but we’ve already established that this movie isn’t on speaking terms with realism, so why bother?
This movie succeeds primarily as a dark comedy. Hauer and Howell both deliver appropriate performances, with Howell varying between realistically calm and hammily frantic based on whether or not Rhyder is in the room, and Hauer portraying a serial killer so unaffected by his own carnage that he makes Hannibal Lector look like a shuddering bundle of nerves. Rhyder seems almost godlike in his capacity to murder indiscriminately, while Jim shows a truly astounding level of stupidity. Because he has no proof of his identity, the police believe Jim’s the murderer. (No, I don’t understand how those two things are related either.) It’s established that he can prove his identity as soon as the business he works for opens on Monday, but he still chooses to run when the Hitcher frees him from police custody via murdering an entire police department. Then Jim take two police officers hostage!
The movie is best remembered for a scene in which Rhyder captures Nash, ties her up between a truck and a trailer and threatens to rip her in half if Jim doesn’t shoot him. This scene is sold as a masochistic struggle between Jim and Rhyder, since Nash has been given little characterization beyond the fact that she “believes Jim.” It’s a struggle that Jim loses, dooming Nash, but Rhyder then allows himself to be arrested by the police. The authorities immediately accept that Jim had nothing to do with any of the previous murders, since the laws of plot convenience dictate that two psychotic murderers cannot exist in the same time and place without the universe imploding.
In most movies, this would be the resolution, but the filmmakers apparently decided that not having a first act meant they needed to do the third act twice. Jim knows that Rhyder will inevitably escape police custody, and that he’s the only one who can stop him! The first clause of that last sentence seems reasonable enough, but the second… not so much. However, Jim steals a police officer’s gun and uses it to steal his car (as if to remind them that they forgot to punish him for the first time he held police officers at gunpoint), so that he can chase down the armored car transporting Rhyder, and finally kill him, because he's a protagonist in the final conflict of the movie, and thus suddenly becomes competent.
This review has been a bit heavy on plot-summary I know, but that’s mainly because it would be ineffective to just tell you how insanely silly this story is. I can’t imagine anyone over the age of five actually being frightened by it. I think if it had come on television when I was younger, I wouldn’t have even thought to classify it as a horror movie, just as a fairly bloody action flick. If that’s what you like, then see it. But if you want to be terrified though, then stay away.
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