rated PG-13

It’s a great title, but maybe for another movie.

Somewhere locked deep in Disney’s vault, there is apparently a secret Pirate Codex that lays out, in great specificity, the elements required to construct and launch a proper “Pirates of the Caribbean” episode. In addition to cutlass-clanging, rope-swinging, rum-swilling and cross-dressing, prerequisites include (but are not limited to) marginalized protagonists, sidelined romance, mutually opposed villains, convoluted plot machinations, and a minimum of 20 extraneous minutes. By cleaving closely to that guidebook, these tides remain wholly familiar. Somewhere along the line, however, someone must have torn out the page that mentioned spark, surprise, inspiration and fun.

rated PG-13

Across the years, through characters like the Hulk, The Thing, Juggernaut, and countless others—including, of course, Thor—Marvel has taken great pains to teach the emotionally underdeveloped of the world that indiscriminate, anger-based smashing is bad, while focused, well-intentioned smashing is good. 

As welcome as this insight may be to preschool teachers and babysitters everywhere, it’s not exactly the making of Shakespearean-level drama. So, all the more curious that infamously Bard-centric director Kenneth Branagh (“Hamlet,” “Love’s Labour’s Lost”) adopts the theme in “Thor.” His attraction to the material, in which a family of immortal royals oversee the nine realms of the galaxy (and who, incidentally, inspired an entire barbarian mythology in Norway on a brief visit to Earth a millennium ago), may be attributable to the necessity for the characters to cope with a range of distractions including war, hubris, jealousy, honor and questionable paternity. 

And in fact, though rendered down to a suitably comic booky four-color form, many of the undercurrents of “Thor” do evoke some notable Shakespearean works, such as “Henry V” and “King Lear.”

rated R

Inanimate threats are certainly no strangers to cinema. A list of improbably anthropomorphized movie bad guys that includes dolls (“Chucky”), dummies (“Magic”), houses (“Amityville Horror”) and cars (“Christine”) leads quickly to even deeper levels of WTF, to otherwise innocuous-cum-iniquitous entities like tomatoes (“Attack of the Killer Tomatoes”), beds (“Deathbed: The Bed that Eats”), and even—God help us—killer laundry presses (“The Mangler”).

Why should we, as discerning cultural consumers, be the least bit surprised by the idea of a homicidally telekinetic tire rolling along on a bloodthirsty killing rampage? French techno musician/filmmaker Quentin Dupieux (who’s only real prior claim to fame was that similarly inexplicable Levi’s ad with the little yellow head-bopping puppet), tells us, literally, directly, and right into the camera: there is no reason. That simple. Movies are not real and are in no way subject to any kind of logic that we might expect from, say, reality.

The surprise, then, is that Dupieux’s movie, in which a sentient tire rolls a dusty highway of destruction exploding bugs, birds, and yes, inevitably people with the power of its evil vulcanized mind, succeeds completely in employing the most ridiculous possible premise to point explicitly at the ridiculousness we’ve come to accept in the stories we blithely consent to pay good money for. A devious look at an industry collapsing under its addiction to recycled ideas and a culture that starves itself with excess, “Rubber” is almost pure metaphor, breaking down the fourth wall like Schrödinger’s cat leaping out of its box to claw at the eyes of the unsuspecting observer.