Grade:  D+

Director:  Joseph Kahn		Released:  January 2004
Writer:  Matt Johnson		MPAA Rating:  PG-13
Players:  Martin Henderson, Ice Cube, Jaime Pressly		Running time:  81 minutes

Ratings System

Torque is winkingly cheesy, or at least I hope it is.  If they thought this was serious material, they were very misguided.  Half the time I expected characters to look at the camera and mug like Mr. Roper on Three's Company.  With lines like, "what is it about driving cars that makes you all such assholes?"  It's clear that motorcyclists rule the earth in this movie, and equally clear that the audience shouldn't expect anything other than bikers kicking ass.  Because, apparently, if you ride a bike, you are automatically a kung-fu fighting badass who hangs out with nobody except bikini clad babes and other badass bikers.  I gotta buy a bike.

This thing is actually a western that substitutes horses with motorcycles.  In westerns, every cowboy can fight.  In this, every biker can fight.  There's even this line: "you've got 'till sundown to hand over my bikes."  Classic!  Only thing missing was a train robbery.  Well, there is a sequence involving a train, and the robbery is of my time for having watched it.

I like this one moment with two characters at a gas station, filling up, when all of a sudden they get inspired!  They know exactly what to do next!  They jump in the truck, hot on the trail, ready to go!  Then one of them says, "you gotta pay for the gas."  Hehe.  Nice jab at the film genre.  I wish there had been more of that and less cheese.

Stunts are cool.  Stunts for the sake of stunts are not cool.  Stunts that serve the story are cool.  Stunts that blatantly ignore laws of physics are not cool.  You know, things like gravity and inertia?  The worst offense is during the "chick fight".  The two girls fighting on their bikes might be the dumbest thing I've ever seen on film.  They literally throw punches at each other using their bikes (that's not even a good description.  It's so stupid it's impossible to describe).  And then the final duel has the "good guy" and the "bad guy" seemingly going 200 mph on their bikes, meanwhile they are fist-fighting from their bikes, throwing kicks and slamming their bikes into each other, all while flying through city traffic.  Ridiculous and lame.

Hey, by the way.  Did you know that when a motorcycle is hit by a train it explodes like a neutron bomb?  Yeah, me neither.

- crocoPuffs