Lets talk. About TORQUE. Put Simply,it's the Fast and The Furious. On Bikes.
Simple pitch really. Now, with a plot so complex it requires words of only one syllable or less, its basically about some warring biker gangs playing a turf war for drugs. One dude, Ford (our hero - you can tell that because he wears a RAMONES shirt), has been set up for drug possession by a rival Biker called Henry James. Ford runs off to Thailand for six months rather than get his girlfriend into trouble, then comes back, but the cops and the rival bikers want his ass. So they set him up for murder, and then even more people want him dead. So the only way out? Well, get on 2 wheels and drive of course. VROOOOOOM! Even the official synopsis says he's wanted for a murder he didn't commit. What is this, the fucking A-team?
And that pretty much sums up the movie. Naturally, There's lot of bike chases. And It's set in California, so there's lots of saturated colours and beautiful scenery. It looks like an advert for the LA tourist board, and looks wonderful. Of course, when you start admiring the scenery, you know the movie isn't that exciting. Of course, it's just a clone of the producers other driving movies (The Fast and the Furious, 2 Fast 2 Furious), even down to the bike meet at the beginning and establishing shots aping the Race Wars sequence in F&F, the natty title design, the screamingly loud use of pop songs (here, it's more nu-metal than hip-hop), and the use of NOS injections, not to mention the CGI Turbo-cam where we go inside the engine to watch it go wummmmph! The only difference is that it's not Carnography, it's Bike porn for the Wheels readers out there. Long, closely shot, lovingly crafted shots of Wheel chains, Rims, Bike engines and technology....the fetishisation of steel and chrome on film.
There's no character development. No subplots. Just a scene of endless , non-stop car chases , bullet fights and hard PG-13 violence that feels like it's been edited down for ratings purposes, cutting away at the last second. Bullets fly into tarmac, setting the road on fire. And though some of the chase scenes are mildly original and exciting, they just descend into unbelievably before too long. Sticking all the crap bits in the trailer doesn't help.
Because lets face it, if you're going to have CGI in a movie, don't have it rendered in a fucking Play station, ok? Every single one of these race scenes is CGI enhanced, and the final chase sequence involving bikes powered by Jet Engines on the Streets of LA if absolutely fucking laughable. I've seen more convincing effects in Doctor Who. All hyperstylised, impossible camera movies, poorly detailed backgrounds, and it's a video game on 35mm ; with shaky game, distorto-vision and goatee bears. Replacing a real explosion with a shit CGI substitute is a terrible idea.
Which is not to say that this movie has no redeeming features. Lush photography, kinetic and adreanalised action scenes with fluid editing make an relatively entertaining movie for the first half, and director Joseph Kahn has some good ideas but doesn't know how far is too far. By the mid point of the film you're laughing at the film, not with it. Like the bit where the biker uses a ramp to drive onto a top of a train carriage and manages to land straight and stop before he falls off. The ramping and editing become bordering on the cartoon, cars fall out of the sky at random and bikes duel like horses bitchslapping each other. And the end chase just peters out, leaving the bad guys riding off into the sunset with a million dollars of crystal meth for the straight to DVD sequel ; rather than ending the film in a proper fashion, it just peters out of gas and comes crawling to a halt. Why not just have a proper decent chase at the end? As opposed to something so confusingly shot and choppily edited that it makes a Andrzej Bartkowiak movie look like the work of a genius such as Ridley Scott. It even apes the blowing up skirt moment out of the CGI racing snoozefest that is Driven.
Ludicrous, Overblown, Risible and Laughable, it makes Fast and the Furious look like the Godfather. It's the kind of film where you sit and watch a second time because you want to make sure it was as bad as you thought it was first time round. And The credits at the end are obviously so tiny and pixellated that it just shows up the failings of DVD. And when the extra's last a total of 4 minutes - you know they really can't be that bothered, except to put in a hidden extra that virtually doubles the added value content of this disc. You get the trailer, but the trailer has all the worst bits of the movie in it. Now, for a movie of wall to wall worst bits, thats quite an achievement. So much so that they CGI'd in a sign saying "Cars Suck" at the beginning. They should have just said "This Film Sucks" and saved a lot of time and money.
Perhaps the best added value content they could have done is actually replace this with a decent fucking movie. At least though, you only waste 80 minutes of your life on this - I suspect that's because if it was any shorter, it couldn't qualify as a full length movie, and if you take off the credits, you only get an hour and 12 minutes of this junk. And junk is what it is.
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