The Work[]
Tank Girl is a 1995 sci-fi film based on a British comic. A rogue comet has struck the Earth and evaporated a mass amount of water from the surface. A decade-long drought has reduced the planet into a giant desert. The scarce amount of water remaining is being held by a mega-corporation, which a girl plans to infiltrate to save her country. With a tank!
The Candidate[]
Kesslee is the CEO of the corporation Water & Power, a company that retains whatever water they can handle. They resort to monopolizing off the water supply and only sell it to the public with extremely high costs. Kesslee wants to own all remaining water in the world and thus see himself as the world's dominator. He also has a special device that is capable of extracting all water from within a living organism, and shows off its effects for the audience by using it on a grunt who failed him, but not before forcing him to step on broken glass for extra kicks and giggles.
Then one water well not owned by W&P is discovered in a house, used by a small community of people. Kesslee reacts by sending his troops out to claim the well for himself by force. They kill the members of the community (including their cow), sparing only Rebecca Buck (aka Tank Girl) and a young girl Sam, who are taken as prisoners. While Sam is sold to become a prostitute, Rebecca is forced to work in Kesslee's factory, where his guards are allowed to harass and beat up the slaves for any minor inconvenience to their labor. Seeing Rebecca's feisty attitude, Kesslee becomes impressed with her potential of becoming a soldier for him. She refuses, prompting Kesslee to force her into complying through torture. He has her chained into a freezing chamber and pushed down a long narrow pipe to inflict claustrophobia, repeated daily until she finally breaks and admits her position as a minion. During an excavation to hunt down the Rippers, a group of rebels against Kesslee, Rebecca is used as live bait to navigate through Ripper territory covered in booby traps. Suddenly, the Rippers ambush the squad and badly injure Kesslee. Rebecca and another slave codenamed "Jet Girl" make their escape during the assault on a tank and jet. How fitting.
Meanwhile, Kesslee is having his body repaired. When a doctor explains his face couldn't be repaired, he has her killed and instead becomes a cyborg with his face becoming a holographic projection. While Rebecca and Jet Girl rescue Sam from the sex club, W&P capture her and taunt them to rescue her. They decide to get support from the Rippers and... ehhhh... they’re mutant kangaroo humanoids.
Once the heroines and Rippers team up and infiltrate the W&P headquarters, Sam is being held hostage in a small cage slowly filling up with water. As Rebecca rushes in to rescue Sam, the Ripper leader Deetee sacrifices himself to destroy the W&P generator and Jet Girl defeats the goon who assaulted her earlier in the film. Kesslee reveals his new form to Rebecca and offers to free Sam if Rebecca surrenders herself to work for him again. Rebecca refuses and engages in a final battle with Kesslee, ending with her short-circuiting his cyborg body with water before using his water extraction device to suck out the water of him until Kesslee was nothing more than a pile of dust and machine scraps.
Factors[]
Nope. He's a selfish megalomaniac who sees himself as superior among the rest of humanity because he controls the remaining water on the planet, completely unphased if the rest of humanity dies from thirst. He's willing to hurt a child by locking Sam in a tube filling up with water and a bad boss by making his new recruit Rebecca become live bait for Ripper booby traps and earlier in the film when he made his failed minion walk on broken glass before using his water extraction device to drain out his liquids.
Standards[]
Despite its R rating, the film is quite tame in tone, with only the darkest portions of the film coming from whenever Kesslee's around, especially during Rebecca's torture and the gruesome establishing shot of him draining the water in his failed minion's body and drinking it. The other villainous characters also meet humorous defeats such as one W&P soldier being hit in the groin by his gun and the greedy owners of the sex club being forced to sing.
Verdict[]
Another win for Malcolm McDowell.