A sort of Two-Lane Blacktop for dullards, Tail Lights Fade follows the paths of two battling couples, one tame (Breckin Meyer and Tanya Allen) and the other trashy (Jake Busey and Denise Richards), as they race cross-country to retrieve a massive drug stash before the feds destroy it. On the surface, Tail Lights Fade would seem to have all the elements necessary for an amped-up little B-movie: a simple plot, foxy starlets (Lisa Marie and Elizabeth Berkley have small roles), a decent soundtrack, and plenty of fast cars. Director Malcolm Ingram, however, mines none of the cheap thrills inherent to such material, and instead turns Tail Lights Fade into the sort of talky, boring relationship comedy-drama that "executive consultant" Kevin Smith would probably make if he were a talentless hack instead of indie film's foremost idiot-savant. Matthew Gissing's script borrows from unusual sources, with the action in the Allen-Meyer car recalling the worst relationship-oriented elements of Smith's films, while Busey and Richards offer cinema's umpteenth variation on the white-trash couple portrayed by Juliette Lewis and Woody Harrelson in Natural Born Killers. Richards and Berkley are predictably terrible (it's good to see that the former's performance in The World Is Not Enough hasn't resulted in her being typecast as a brilliant nuclear scientist), but no one fares well, particularly the bland Meyer and the whiny Allen. Gissing's dialogue is so awful that it makes you wish the filmmakers had gone the Two-Lane Blacktop route and kept its easy riders alternately silent and monosyllabic.