If you are a fan of movies such as "Battlefield Earth", "Plan 9 from Outer Space" and "Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter", then this film is totally for you. If you know even a little about motorcycles, then you will find it funnier than the "Naked Gun".
*MINOR SPOILERS FOLLOW*
The film has one tiny virtue - unlike "Biker Boyz", the *ahem* scriptwriters of this masterpiece have realised that motorcyclists do not regard riding in a straight line as interesting. So there IS one good sequence early on of a group of riders tackling a twisty desert highway. I was almost misled into believing that it might be a decent film, but that didn't last.
Virtues now dealt with, let's explore the full artistic squalor that Torque delivers. I won't bother with the plot - suffice it to say that there are these really mean biker gangs who will happily slaughter someone with a bike chain, sell large quantities of hard drugs but who won't use the *F* word.
The acting - there isn't any. With dialogue like this, you wouldn't want to use real actors - their own bowels would rise up and throttle them before permitting these lines to be uttered in front of a camera.
But it's a motorcycle movie, so let's examine that aspect. In case anyone doesn't know, there are two main divisions of motorcycle - street and dirt. The entire design approach is different for some very good reasons - if you put a street bike on loose dirt, it will generally fall over due to lack of traction. Miraculously, the bikes in Torque seem quite capable of doing the most spectacular stunts on very loose sand.
I'll forgive that - keen eyed observers will note that they simply took dirt bikes, glued some plastic (known as 'fairings') on them to make them look like street bikes and found some very skilled dirt riders for the stunts. However, as the movie progresses, the scriptwriters felt the need to delve deeper and deeper into the realm of silliness, with increasingly ridiculous stunts that first defy and then insult the laws of physics. The train scene involves one pirouette that fails to observe the rule that "if the real wheel spins, the bike goes forward".
The final all-CGI chase sequence is so stupid it's hard to make comments - the Harley cruiser being chased probably has a top speed of 100 mph, yet it appears to be travelling at speeds in excess of 300 mph. In this era of Lord of the Rings, it's hard to believe that CGI this bad could be released - it looks like they couldn't think of anything interesting to show, so they just blurred everything. Including the jet-engine Y2K motorcycle was a nice touch at least (it really does exist).
A few other technical comments - generally when moving at 150 mph, long blonde hair gets blown about by the wind, but not in TORQUE. During all that blue screen work, surely some technician could have stood in front of the girl with a hair dryer at least. The product placement is laughably clumsy - there is a "Pepsi-Mountain Dew" battle, and you only ever see two brand names of motorcycle (the British Triumph and Italian Aprilia) although it is obvious that 98% of the bikes are Japanese. The film has a large number of massive explosions caused by crashing bikes. As most of the bikes would have 17-20 litre tanks (5-7 gallons) and given that they have been riding around in the desert all day and so would be near empty , I find it hard to believe that they could create a 50 foot explosion, but maybe that's just me.
Even for the fact that the bike stunts are so silly, they are still the best aspect of the film, and had they occupied most of the film I would have graded it higher. Unfortunately to get to the bike stunts we have to sit through way too many lengthy and turgid periods of "drama".
I gave the film 2/10, mainly for the producers having the sheer audacity to go for a theatre release and not condemning it to "straight to video".
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