and the rise of the American Furious Movement

TORQUE is the most spectacularly ridiculous movie I’ve seen in a while, making even 2 FAST, 2 FURIOUS seem pretty reasonable and down to earth. The movie opens with a shot of a tortoise standing between two street race cars at a starting line. The cars take off down a dusty road at impossible speeds. Suddenly, reflected in one car’s rear-view mirror, is some dude on a motorcycle. He has a hard time passing the cars but once he does he does a big wheelie and leaves them in the dust. A street sign spins uncontrollably in the wake of the motorcycle creating the illusion that it says “CARS SUCK.” And from there we cut to the opening credits.

You hear that, FAST AND THE FURIOUS? The gauntlet has been thrown down. Cars suck, motorcycles rule. Or own. Or whatever it’s called now. In case FAST AND THE FURIOUS came into the movie late though, because it was out in the lobby text messaging somebody, there is a part later on where the hero says, “I live life a quarter mile at a time,” and his girlfriend says, “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.” These movies may start some kind of deadly motorcycles vs. cars feud, but they’re both from the same producer, Neal H. Moritz.

The hero is named Ford, but Ice Cube (as Trey, the leader of Inglewood’s black motorcycle gang The Reapers) prefers to call him “the white boy” or “Dawson’s Creek.” I’m not sure what they were thinking having the blandest possible white man as the hero and asking the audience to root against Ice Cube, but that’s what they did. Martin Henderson, the Kiwi former soap star who plays Ford, makes Paul Walker seem like fuckin Al Pacino. He wears a Ramones t-shirt as some sort of a vague hint that he has a personality. Cube does all right, scowling and being pissed off all the time, though he doesn’t seem as tough when he’s wearing a leather biker jacket with sponsorship logos on it. He does have a dog named Dojo who he refers to by name alot. (more…)

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