Stronger Plots Than This
by Ed Owens

"...persons attempting to find a plot in {this narrative} will be shot..." --Mark Twain

Trying to capitalize on the success of The Fast & The Furious and looking to capture more than just the five people that saw last year's Biker Boyz, Torque rushed into theaters last weekend after spending literally years on Warner Bros. shelves (filming actually took place in mid-2002). Any doubts I may have had about Torque's intentions were clearly laid to rest within the first two minutes, a strident, street-smart showdown with more cuts, moves, and angles than all of Titanic's 3+ hour running time. The film's ruthless economy establishes characters in fewer strokes than Barnett Newman's "The Voice" with a pace that could only have been set by a jazzed up lure during a power surge. By the time I got to the biker rally five minutes later, with its lusty shots of bikes being sensually washed by the scantily clad cast of Girls Gone Wild, I knew exactly what I was in for.

The reason Torque is able to develop characters so quickly is because there's so little there to develop. The hero is prototypical Wrong Man Cary Ford, who, rather tellingly, is addressed by nearly everyone in the film as simply Ford (then again, the name Cary doesn't exactly translate as badass lone wolf biker hero). Ford, it seems, has returned from Thailand (which other characters confuse with a wide variety of Asian locales in the film's only attempt at a running joke) to make things right, "things" like two sidekicks, two rival motorcycle gangs, two FBI agents, and two bikes filled with crystal meth (in fact, the number two pops up so often that one can only assume writer Matt Johnson --no relation to the guiding force behind The The --was superstitious...that or the fact that three or more risked hopelessly confusing the film's target audience).

Martin Henderson, recognizable only because of his recent appearance in The Ring, plays Ford with orange/black riding leathers and accompanying smirk, and Ice Cube is...well...Ice Cube (pre-Barbershop, which is to say mostly storming around looking angry, constipated, or both) as the lead biker who suspects Ford of killing his brother. Both are called upon to do little more than look good on a bike while not falling off and manage to deliver their lines with straight faces (two feats that are both more difficult than they would look). The rest of the cast, including Matt Schulze (who here risks typecasting after having played exactly the same character in The Fast & The Furious), mainly glowers from behind various body ink and piercings

But the film's raison d'être is its motorcycles...the people astride them are mere window dressing. Director Joseph Kahn applies layers of gloss and style (acquired from years of prolific work in music videos), then polishes to a high sheen, the substantive cinematic equivalent of Michelob Ultra. The myriad maneuvers strain plausibility as motorcycles zip in, through, and around different locales, from the wind-mill littered landscapes to the glass canyons of LA -- to include on top and inside of a moving train. The sheer absurdity of it all is so over-the-top, so cheesily bad, as to almost become enjoyable on a visceral level. I occasionally found myself laughing out loud, though whether it was at or with the film is hard to determine.

Saying Torque is bad misses the point -- the question is whether or not it's actually bad enough. The film itself knows what it is, and even takes pot shots at some of its more self-important colleagues. At one point, Ford echos The Fast & The Furious' Toretto (Vin Diesel), telling full-time grease monkey and part-time girlfriend Shane that he lives life a quarter mile at a time. Her reply pretty much says it all: "That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard."

©2004 Ed Owens
CineScene