Boys Town
Boys Town
UP FRONT
David Edwards
HAND-WRINGERS CAN NOW RELAX. The film Biker Boyz has come and gone. Unlike Marlon Brando’s The Wild One from 50 years ago, it was not the cinematic sucker punch that many feared. It will not cause ordinary citizens to quake at the mere sight of loudly painted GSXRs. It will not incite legislators to introduce bills mandating the gas chamber for those found guilty of wheelies, stoppies and smoky burn-outs.
It was just a bad movie.
Hey, don’t take just my word for it. Bring in the professionals. Reviews on this turkey were so bad you could make an anti-poster from the excerpts:
Two thumbs down!!! Loud, silly and pointless...about as gritty as a high-school production of West Side Story...just a silly film!!!
-Ebert & Roeper and the Movies
Neither fast nor furious...you see one wheelie, you’ve seen them all!!!
-Christie Lemire, Associated Press
A real drag!!! Not even an injection of nitrous oxide could save this torpid pic!!!
-Guylaine Cadorette, Hollywood.com
A dreary, overlong, unfocused bore!!! After 20 minutes my eyes started to glaze over and the face of my watch became considerably more interesting than anything going on up on the screen!!!
-Robert W. Butler, Kansas City Star
This ain’t exactly adrenaline-fueled inanity. It’s worse!!!
-Annette Cardwell, Filmcritic.com
Strange how a movie that borrows so freely from High Noon, The Empire Strikes Back and last summer’s street-racer hit The Fast and the Furious can be so lacking in plot. Stranger yet how this movie’s usually excellent actors-Laurence Fishbume {What’s Love Got To Do With It?, Othello), Derek Luke {Antwone Fisher), Eriq LaSalle (“ER”), Djimon Hounsou {Amistad) Lisa Bonet (“The Cosby Show”)-seem to be sleep-walking through their mono-dimensional roles. Not even a charity bikini bike wash scene, proceeds going to a literacy campaign, can breathe life into this PG13 hum-drummer-though maybe some of
the donations should be siphoned off to help the scriptwriters?
For those who missed Biker Boyz at the multiplex-and judging by the movie’s plummeting box office, that’s most of you-the screenplay was inspired by a newspaper article of the same name about L.A.-area AfricanAmerican motorcycle clubs that engage in afterhours street-racing.
Fishburne’s character, Smoke, is the middle-aged president of the Black Knights (club motto: Bum rubber, not your soul). Riding a blinged-out Hayabusa, he’s never been beaten, the undisputed “King of Cali” (as in California). Luke plays Kid, a 19-year-old Gixxer gunslinger spoiling for a shootout with Smoke. First he must get past Dogg, prez of the Stray Dogs M/C, played rather woodenly by rapper Kid Rock, fresh from his triumphant film debut in Joe Dirt. Throw in some exciting, if overdone, handheld camera work and a Darth Vader/Luke Skywalker-type plot twist wherein Smoke turns out to be Kid’s biological father, and well, that’s about it. Tess of the D ’Urbervilles, it ain’t.
From a rider’s standpoint, there are some absurdities in the action sequences that really gall. Wanting to prove his racing proficiency, Kid horns in on a contest. He gives the other two bikes a head start, takes to a vacant side lot, flies over a berm, powers past on the top end, then jumps to a standing position on the seat at the finish line. All this while wearing a floppy-fitting jacket, half-helmet and no eye protection. Hollywood!
Even the straight racing scenes are handled poorly, riders barely tucked in, swerving Ben Hur-like toward each other at speed, first one ahead, then the other, both finding magical reserves of speed as the director cuts to incessant close-ups of speedometers, needles wavering in the triple digits. This flick is to motorcycle street-racing what the sappy Days of Thunder was to stock-car racing.
And I’m not even getting into the big Smoke vs. Kid finale for the title of California’s top street-racer, which-of coursetakes place on a farmer’s dirt road!
Okay, so Tinseltown gets it wrong once again. Is that news?
No, but in an industry where original ideas are harder to find than siliconefree bustlines, it’s disturbing that streetracing is now on producers’ radar screens. Already, Torque, a grittier, Rrated black-biker movie is in the can, due for a fall release. We can take solace, I suppose, in the fact that Boyz will barely make back its $20 million production costs, and that Torque’s debut has been pushed back twice, never a good sign in the motion picture biz.
What of those who worry about our public image being damaged by these types of films? First, the sport is stronger than that. People realize that motorcycling is multifaceted-toy runs, Jay Leno, Valentino Rossi, the Discovery Channel, Mike Metzger, etc. have seen to that. This is not the 1960s, when The Glory Stompers and Hell ’s Angels on Wheels had the populace worried about torched towns and bespoiled daughters.
More worrisome are the actual stunt riders who inspired the movies. Look, we all like a good wheelstand or rolling burn-out, and no argument the best of these practitioners are immensely talented, with amazing bike control. It’s the lesser emulators (trust me, it doesn’t take deep reserves of skill or razorsharp reflexes to hoist a GSX-R1000 or YZF-R1 these days) that are causing problems, showing off in heavy traffic and in some cases plowing into and killing innocent bystanders.
But as complaints pile up and the cops inevitably turn up the heat (locating stunters is easy, just follow the trail of video cameras), someone will take stunt riding off the streets, just as the NHRA sprung up from illegal drag racing, just as Freestyle MX, once the bastion of back lots, is now the highest rated of TV’s extreme sports. Unlike Biker Boyz, that might be a ticket worth buying. U
