"Rubber, burning, destroys Hollywood in mysterious unnatural quake"

“An homage to no reason,” to the gimmicks for the sake of gimmicks, to the schtick over the feat of imagination—Quentin Dupieux’s Rubber is an indictment of the film industry's hand in its own undoing, a business originally built on imposed suspension of disbelief and presently fallen into disrepair, shoddily patched with sequels, remakes, CGI and 3D. With the first full-length film from Dupieux, aka Mr. Oizo, we get a glimpse at sterilized imagination at its most gimmicky. Rubber is an account of a psycho-kenetic and psychotic car tire’s killing spree; it is also heavy-handed metafiction at its best and worse. Where one might expect the fourth wall, Rubber has put binoculars in the audience’s hands – ours and those of its own, fictionalized, stand-ins – and it has given us a full staff (actors, an overseer/producer, credited as "the accountant", etc.) to make us point these in the right directions; and to poison us when they feel ready to start giving up on the story they have begun telling.

The result is the director’s display of his affinity for the conceptual and, concurrently, the ridiculous. As such, he unabashedly demonstrates knowledge of his strength’s handicaps. The film is a myriade of gimmicks and it is not afraid to admit and explore the fact.
The purpose of the exploration is to suggest Hollywood’s undoing in the midst of the ever-present force of the “no reason” gimmick. In an era where films are either remakes or displays of “no hands” show-off filmmaking (pointless as they may be), Rubber and its Robert, the puppet-ed and stock-motion-animated psychotic tire, is a total fuck you of a move. The result is, overwhelmingly, the power of scrutiny: the power to, essentially, see the gimmick, in this case the sentient and wrathful tire, for the novelty and audience-killer it is.
As playfully and lightly as it is rendered, Dupieux’s account comes with a true resentment of what is leading to the death of the cinematic audience’s engagement: the consistent complacency of the said audience. Here it is embodied by the singular member of it (the stubbornly enthused critic, the cinematically disabled—a man, with binoculars, in a wheelchair) keeps watching and refuses the poisoned food the accoutant keeps trying to, goofily, feed him. Dupieux’s loathing for such a viewer climaxes when Robert, having been blown away, finally, by an impatient player in the movie (the sheriff who originally introduced the said concept of “an homage to no reason”), resurrects as a tricycle and blows the remaining audience member’s head off.
Shoddy timing and plastic conceptual characters—the film’s strength is its self-conscious flimsiness. It is, one might hope, a work of self-mutilation, a shaky self-conscious mediocrity, which attempts to propound the heartless nature of the gimmicky crutches slowly replacing storytelling in Hollywood.
The film's final scene, after several amending scenes, shows the tricycle, Robert, hi-tailing it out of the desert towards Hollywood, along with other sentient tires in its tracks, to hit the industry where it hurts, and where it may itself realize the long forgotten strengths of original story telling. The final frames show the Holywood hills in the background, cracks in the pavement at the vaguely, menacingly, vibrating tricycle’s base. Rubber, finally, suggests its time to move on, altogether, from Hollywood. Break ties and start over. One is, in hindsight, inclined to agree.