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Tuesday, 06 July 2004 |
  A trend I have been noticing recently is that many movies are getting shorter. After years of running times stretching longer and longer, until the average movie was over 2 hours, I have seen several in the last year which were under 90 minutes. Until recently, I couldn't remember the last time I saw a movie which ran less than 90 minutes and wasn't animated. A short running time is particularly beneficial with Torque because the first 15 minutes seemed like they lasted an eternity. Fortunately, the remaining 60+ minutes got a bit better, though I may have just become numb.
Torque is a seemingly pointless movie about a bunch of motorcycle fanatics who appear to do nothing but ride around California all day wearing leather and looking foolish. In true genre fashion, the story revolves around the good, bad guy Cary Ford (Martin Henderson) who has been "out of town" for a while hiding from the feds for some crime he was, no doubt, set up to take the fall for. He starts us off by teaching the one theme of the movie. People who ride motorcycles are good and people who drive cars are bad. There, I just saved you the additional 83.5 minutes required to watch the movie. There is even a shot in the opening scene where a street sign spins to make the words "cars suck" which is about as interesting as this movie gets.
Ford returns to his old stomping grounds as well as to his old girlfriend Shane (Monet Mazur) and is instantly confronted by a staggering series of good bad guys, bad bad guys, really bad bad guys and comical federal agents in a Hummer. The story? Let's just say it is a series of double crosses, triple crosses, hiding drugs, figuring out who the worst bad guys are and so on. It's really a vehicle for a lot of motorcycle stunts, most of which are just computer generated images and not the least bit exciting. In fact, I am quite certain the final chase in the movie does not have a single physical being in it, since it looks suspiciously like a Nintendo game.
There are so many bad points to Torque I couldn't believe the things I was noticing. Enough beer bottles were tossed aside to cover the the state of California in broken glass. I did chuckle once at a clever slam of The Fast and the Furious, which obviously inspired this movie. The climax involves a motorcycle which is powered by a a helicopter engine. As cool as that may sound, it is not only practically impossible to do, but it wouldn't make any sense to do it in the first place. Actually, my second chuckle came when I heard the turbine engine in this motorcycle start to wind up. Probably the most interesting aspect was Jaime Pressly's biker girl character, China. Unfortunately, not much is done with her, except for her to sit there with her leather garb and face piercings.
Torque is basically the movie it is intended to be, which saves it from getting an even lower rating, but that doesn't make it a success. The chases are so outrageous and artificial, they are weak. For some truly staggering chases, check out the Robert DeNiro film Ronin which has some of the greatest, non CGI chases ever put on film. The macho camp aspect of Torque has been done so many times, with most of them being significantly better. Reign of Fire is a particularly good example, as is the inspiration for this movie The Fast and the Furious, a film which is not particularly strong, but substantially better than Torque.
Starring: Martin Henderson, Ice Cube, Monet Mazur, Adam Scott, Matt Schulze, Jay Hernandez.
Director: Joseph Kahn
Studio: Warner Brothers
Rated: PG-13
Running Time: 85 minutes
Release: 2003
Reviewer: John Rice |
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