Butler's Cinema Scene

"Gadget" with his retrofitted electric car

“REVENGE OF THE ELECTRIC CAR”  My rating: C+ 

90 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

Few things are as compelling as righteous indignation.

That’s one reason why Chris Paine’s 2008 documentary “Who Killed the Electric Car?”    became something of a sleeper hit.

That film dissected the rise and fall of GM’s all-electric EV1, which was leased to hugely satisfied customers (mostly in California), then withdrawn and scrapped when company bigwigs concluded there was no profit in electric vehicles.

“Who Killed…” was ideal for getting people riled up about electric vehicles, fossil fuel pollution, corporate malfeasance and especially the idea of a petroleum-based conspiracy to suppress electric car technology.

Now we get Paine’s sequel, “Revenge of the Electric Car,” and as the title suggests, it’s about the impending triumph of all-electric autos.

It’s informative and slickly made.

But this success story (well, sort of… the jury is still out) isn’t nearly as much fun to watch as its ire-inducing predecessor. It’s no longer a David and Goliath yarn now that David has joined the Philistine army.

Paine concentrates on three corporations.

At the startup electric car company Tesla he digs into the mind of founder and PayPal millionaire Elon Musk and chronicles the company’s struggle to turn out an initial fleet of hugely expensive electric cars.

He also looks at Nissan and hard-driving head honcho Carlos Ghosn’s efforts to produce the electric Leaf.

Finally there’s good old GM, where one-time electric-naysayer Bob Lutz (by far the most colorful character in sight) has done a 180 and now proclaims electric cars the way of the future.

And just for the heck of it, Paine spends some times in the mom-and-pop shop of a guy called Gadget, who retrofits existing sports cars to run on electricity.

The film takes us through the 2008 economic meltdown, which threatened to not just shut down electric car production but to flatten the entire U.S. auto industry, and to the present, where these cars are now available to the public.

Tim Robbins narrates, and there’s plenty of talking-head commentary from automotive and financial journalists.

It’s a perfectly acceptable documentary, but whereas “Who Killed the Electric Car?” had across-the-board appeal, “Revenge…” seems geared mostly to car buffs and techno heads.

| Robert W. Butler