Torque (Martin Henderson, Ice Cube)
no gummy bears
There is a brand of moviemaking that is quickly becoming more and more common. I would basically define it as a genre where you can't tell whether the movie you're watching is really, really bad or really, really good. On the one hand, you are cocooned in slack-jawed disbelief at the blatant and frequent contrivances. On the other hand, you can't help but wonder, what with the cost to make movies today and the pressure to keep audiences in step for fear of box office suicide, maybe those automated groans and bursts of condescending laughter that are routinely induced are actually, believe it or not, intentional. Given how many people attend the movies on a regular basis, maybe these reactions are the end goal; a recompense for the patient moviegoers who have likely seen it all before and are tired of being legitimately let down by motion pictures they had high aspirations for. To me, the upswing in preposterous action flicks (and the like) is a short-cut attempt by Hollywood writers and directors to avoid trying to make a legitimately good movie. If the project fails, there is a scapegoat to barely fall back on: "Duh! We meant for it to be that silly."
For the producers, this will be no doubt be their justification for releasing Torque, a movie about motorbike racing, inner city gangs who operate out of the desert, and the innate need to deafen multiplex audiences everywhere. Fresh from the academy of Fast, Furious and Braindead, this is an ultra-slick mess strung together by offensive dialogue, phony CGI effects and some of the most spectacular, in-your-face product placements ever committed to celluloid. The script in particular is a hateful mix of racist characterizations during the first half and a ridiculous homicide caper for the second half.
Kurt Russell plays Ford, a wild young man with the philosophical forethought to have the words "Carpe Diem" stitched onto his biker jumsuit. Wanted by the law for stealing a bunch of motorbikes that contain crystal meth(!), Ford decides to clear his name for his part in the theft. Things get more complicated when he is set up for the murder of Tyrese. Maria Bello plays his love interest, a thong-sporting tough girl who, near the end, takes on a villainous, pierced goth girl (Fairuza Balk) aboard jousting motorbikes; this is so we can observe the systematic deconstruction of the laws of physics. We know that something's up with that bad Henry guy (Orlando Bloom with a mullet) because he picks on kindly tourists (how much you wanna bet these innocent yuppies inadvertently end up smack dab in the middle of a highway chase scene?), and Mark Ruffalo is the comic relief FBI guy who's always just one step away from closing the case.
For the uninitiated, a litmus test as to whether you would like this movie can be answered based on the following questions. Would it make sense if you saw two souped-up, pristine cars alone on a narrow piece of road in the middle of the desert, about to race each other, prompted by a traffic light that by all rights should not be there? Do you go for chase scenes that start with a strategically placed wooden beam that takes two motorbikes aboard a moving train, then continue with one bike driving through the passenger compartment while the second one manages to drive off the front of the locomotive and outrace it? Do you believe that murder investigations can be solved based on the irrefutable evidence that no two sparkplugs (or gaskets or crankshafts, I can't remember) are the same and are "just like fingerprints"? Do you believe people can stand on top of speeding motorcycles, jump from one moving bike to another, and read road maps while driving their motorbikes into oncoming traffic? If you've answered yes to these ponderances, you are in for a special treat when you take in this special oeuvre.
Torque exists in a netherworld between implausibility and impossibility. It doesn't want to be shackled by the banal, confining restrictions of reality and, in this sense, it soars free, like an uncaged bird discovering the sky for the very first time. When movies of its kind check logic at the door, they have to at least make penance by giving the audience a good time. On a guilty level, I will conceed that perhaps Torque does get a passing grade in this regard; watching it was as much fun I've had in a movie theatre in quite some time. That, however, does not change the fact that it is also one of the stupidest films ever made, and surely everyone involved in the project knew this as well. They say that studios dump their leftovers into theatres in January, and here is the most astonishing proof imaginable. On the cinematic teeter-totter between being deliberately bad and being bad without even knowing it, an elephant is sitting on the wrong side of Torque.
