MOVIE REVIEW : Motorized Thriller Runs Out of Gas Early

The idea behind “Freeway” (citywide) seems a natural, but this would-be super-motorized L.A. thriller blows a tire halfway through.

It’s the tale of a gun-mad killer who prowls the local roads, mostly Highway 210, picking out random victims, and describing his wild Pilgrim’s Progress in crypto-religious terms that borrow heavily from Revelations and Hieronymus Bosch, to a flip, cynical call-in radio psychiatrist, Dr. David Lazarus (Richard Belzer).

The symbolic underpinnings are really promising: L.A. as the city of glassed-over anomie, full of isolated people in weird cul-de-sacs, lost in fantasies and obsessions, wired in by answering machines, radio and TV, never connecting except in near-anonymous sex or the violent clashes of the crazy, spinning, hellish roadways.

There’s also religious satire. Kenneth Tobey plays a mad monsignor and the killer describes himself in Karloffian tones as the God-appointed clean-up man for Sunset and Gomorrah. His main antagonists are a bereaved blonde nurse (Darlanne Fluegel), a sleepy-eyed cop (Michael Callan), who seems to resent any physical labor beyond raising his eyebrows, and Frank Quinn (James Russo), a mystery man with a Don Johnson coiffure, a lewd lip and a crucifix over his T-shirt.

You keep anticipating a variation on Spielberg’s truck-vs.-man classic, “Duel,” with its murderously inevitable mechanical crescendo. Unfortunately, action fortissimos aren’t this movie’s forte. Perhaps the logistics were too demanding, the budget too small. Most of the shootings, understandably, take place at night or on fairly deserted roads. But the seemingly irresistible possibilities for virtuoso “Road Warrior” stunts--cars threading in and out of tangles, with the radio battle of wits going full blast--are largely unexploited.

Writer-director Francis Delia, making his feature debut, has a cool, lucid style. But he doesn’t build toward a paroxysm. There’s nothing in this movie that approaches the white-knuckle intensity of the wrong-way chase in the bigger-budgeted “To Live and Die in L.A.” And there should be; there’s no other real reason to make movies like this. Instead, Delia veers off into standard lady-in-distress maneuvers and religioso macabre. With his killer such a lunatic superman, it’s hard to feel he’s a threat.

But there’s something fresh anyway in “Freeway” (MPAA rated R: for language, nudity, sex and violence): Belzer’s Dr. Lazarus. In this character, who gives the film a kind of running verbal filigree, the manic one-upmanship of a Rick Dees and Belzer’s own sour pessimism are laced with the disaffected, trance-like cool of “Choose Me’s” Dr. Nancy Love. Along with Callan’s congenitally lazy Lt. Doyle, it’s the film’s most interesting performance. It sticks a few icy slivers of L.A. languid hip into the slick, blank crannies of the plot.