Made one year before his breakout in The Ice Storm, Tobey Maguire turned in a confident and amusing performance despite having some iffy material to work with in Joyride.

Not to be confused with Joy Ride, this unlikely story has a bored motel clerk (Maguire), his questionable-sexuality best friend (Wilson Cruz), and a model-wannabe (Christina Naify, a former stuntwoman) stealing a car from the motel. Wouldn't you know it, the beautiful woman (Amy Hathaway) who owns the car happens to be an assassin, and there's a dead guy in the trunk.

There's not much more to this story, of course. After this point, the movie becomes a cat and mouse game among the car thieves, the assassin, and the cops (including Benicio Del Toro). It's not much more challenging than late-night Cinemax, in fact I'm pretty sure I saw this on Cinemax years ago, but now it's out on DVD.

It's a 90-minute piece of harmless celluloid that's sometimes fun and often derivative, shot almost entirely at night and usually with one scantily-dressed blonde in the scene. It's not awful. The acting is fine. The pace is terribly slow. And the excitement level is a solid two. Even Adam West's appearance can't elevate this above B-grade thrills.

Or on second thought, it can... to a solid B+.