'Torque' is like an 81-minute action video

Friday, January 16, 2004

By Ron Weiskind, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

I'll say this for "Torque" (and then much more against it): The movie is nothing if not kinetic, and it is capable of winking at its own idiocy.

	'TORQUE' Rating: PG-13 for violence, sexuality, language and drug references. Starring: Martin Henderson, Ice Cube, Monet Mazur. Director: Joseph Kahn.

"I live a quarter mile at a time," proclaims Cary Ford (Martin Henderson), a biker falsely accused of murder and drug dealing who keeps riding high when he should be laying low. His girlfriend, Shane (Monet Mazur), says what we're all thinking about his remark: "That's the stupidest thing I ever heard."

But, hey, we're talking motorheads on a testosterone glut, all scowls and growls and macho posturing. Even the women, all shapely and trashy enough for Hustler magazine, seem to have cojones the size of truck tires.

We know we're not supposed to take it the least bit seriously, and the filmmakers try to tell us they don't, either, in shots like the one that lines up a dozen bikers along the edge of a hillside to simultaneously answer nature's call (we don't have to see it, not when it sounds like a wide-open tap).

Or maybe it's the sequence in which Trey Wallace (Ice Cube), seeking vengeance against the man he thinks killed his brother, chases Ford alongside a moving train -- and on top of it, through it and in front of it. Even the wimpiest nerd has to admit that these stunts look almost as cool as they are utterly ridiculous.

And that's the point, of course: what it looks like. First-time feature director Joseph Kahn made his name (all together now) making music videos. "Torque" aspires to be an 81-minute action video, the kind that will give you a small headache either because of the negligible screenplay of Matt Johnson or the editing of Howard E. Smith and David Blackburn, as inescapable as Cube's arsenal of firearms.

The movie begins with Ford riding his bike roughshod through two drag-racing cars, leading to the first of the evening's many pugilistic events. We can tell right away he's a good guy -- he's nice to a kid, whereas the dragsters shove the lad aside.

So it's fight first, talk later. When he finally does (talk, that is), Ford explains how he ran out on Shane six months earlier because he found crystal meth hidden in the gas tanks of two bikes left in his care by Henry (Matt Schulze), who makes up in temper what he lacks in intellect (he's a real nasty fellow). Henry frames Ford for the murder of Trey's brother, setting two gangs against our hero.

Strike three arrives in the form of the unlikeliest FBI agent this side of Fox Mulder. McPherson (Adam Scott) looks like he stepped into the wrong movie with his fashion-plate style. But he's oh, so sardonic and blase and, in the end, just as crazy as the guys he's chasing. If any of these people could act, we might be able to see how much tongue is in their cheek.

Cars crash, bikes flip, riders stunt-fight each other on machines supposedly going 200 miles per hour, things blow up real good. It's like combining the freeway chase sequence from "The Matrix Reloaded" with Wrestlemania. The final chase scene morphs into its own universe as the bikes travel at "Knight Rider" speed through the streets of Los Angeles, warping the sightlines and blowing out car windows in their wake.

Bang. Zoom. That about covers it.

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