August 17, 2005

I have honestly been curious about SUPERCROSS, a.k.a. SUPERCROSS: THE MOVIE, for twenty years now. My curiosity has been satiated. I am now SUPERCROSS: THE VIEWER.

I think I saw a trailer or two for it but I’m sure most people never heard it of it. I’d bet it was heavily advertised on relevant sports broadcasts and not as much for the rest of us. I noticed on the credits that it was a production of “Clear Channel Entertainment Motor Sports,” which I guess is part of the same Clear Channel then infamous for monopolizing the radio market. Most of us learned about them after September 11th when they released a list of songs for their stations not to play (including anything by Rage Against the Machine). I guess radio ads must not have been enough, because it only made $3.3 million toward its $30 million budget.

I really didn’t know if it was just a sports movie or, like, motorcycle riders stop a terrorist attack or whatever. Unfortunately it’s the first one. A very generic and straightforward underdog story about two brothers who make ends meet working as pool cleaners until they get a big break that brings them to the heights of motocross. The storytelling is weird because the opening is narrated by Trip Carlyle (Mike Vogel, GRIND, THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, THE SISTERHOOD OF THE TRAVELING PANTS) but then it quickly becomes clear that the main character is his older brother K.C. (Steve Howey, soon to be in DOA: DEAD OR ALIVE) and Trip is the horny comic relief brother, like Johnny Knoxville in THE DUKES OF HAZZARD but looking like poor man’s Sean William Scott.

Then suddenly there’s a dramatic scene where K.C. yells about how everyone knows Trip is the one with the natural talent and he would make it if he would just apply himself. And on his own Trip manages to get into a race competing against his brother, so maybe it really will be his story. Oh no, scratch that, he gets horribly injured in the race and it’s not about him anymore. Huh.

Anyway the basics are that these guys are small-timers but K.C. makes enough of an impression in a race that he gets invited to try out the test track of motorcycle manufacturer Nami. Then he gets recruited to their team run by Clay Sparks (Robert Carradine in his followup to TIMECOP 2: THE BERLIN DECISION, from the same director) which seems like a dream come true until he finds out it’s a vanity team for Sparks’ superstar son Rowdy (Channing Tatum, who had only been in COACH CARTER and HAVOC) and K.C. will be pressured not to ever win himself but just run interference for Rowdy. Shake and bake, baby.

We learn that this is called being on a “factory team,” but he also has rivals who are “privateers” like Owen Cole, a blond pretty boy I did not recognize as pop star Aaron Carter, since I’m only vaguely familiar with who that is. Owen is coached by his dad, Earl (Robert Patrick right before WALK THE LINE), who disapproves of his sexy racer/mechanic daughter Piper (Cameron Richardson, NATIONAL LAMPOON’S BARELY LEGAL, NATIONAL LAMPOON PRESENTS DORM DAZE) flirting with Trip, but allows him to join their little team and ultimately becomes the backer for K.C. when he dares to quit Nami and enter the big Supercross event in Vegas as a privateer.

I want to mention that K.C. gets a new girlfriend the same day as his brother. Weird luck. His is Zoe (Sophia Bush, NATIONAL LAMPOON’S VAN WILDER), a rich girl whose pool they clean and he has a crush on her. After he awkwardly asks her to come to the race she sort of appoints herself his manager. In a good way, though. She’s very helpful.

Much like HERBIE: FULLY LOADED with all its NASCAR stuff, this has a bunch of cameos of famous sports vehiclists and generally it’s obvious that that’s what you’re looking at although unsurprisingly I never heard of or a saw a single one of them before or since.

There’s a subplot about a dude who confronts and threatens K.C. before a couple events. I actually don’t know which character this was otherwise I’d tell you the actor. He’s bald and tattooed to the point that I wondered if he was a skinhead. I really didn’t understand until later that he was one of the other racers. I’m sure that’s partly on me, but it also brings up a major problem with making a movie about motocross – you really have to be heavily invested in the sport to be able to make a connection between the indistinguishable helmet-heads flying around in the dirt and the faces and names of the characters we see off the track. Although they do insert some fake face closeups here and there in the real race footage it’s mainly just the (admittedly pretty well done) color commentary that ever tells us who we might be looking at and what they might be doing.

This is a clunky movie in most regards but I do think it’s slightly more watchable than some of the other clunkers I’ve watched in this series because the underdog sports template always has a little appeal, because Howey projects the wooden blankness of a guy who really only cares about motorcycle excellence, because it’s fun to see Tatum doing his thing before we knew there was a Tatum or that he had a thing, and because it is pretty cool how much they rely on what is clearly footage from real events. I’m sure it would look much better with modern cameras, but it’s kind of cool how you can see the footage get muddier as they resort to some special camera to be attached to a bike going off a jump or whatever.

Unsurprisingly it’s directed by a stunt veteran, Steve Boyum, who was in THE BLUES BROTHERS, ROLLERBALL, PREDATOR and much more. At this point he had already directed one movie about motocross (MOTOCROSSED) as well as movies about surfing (MEET THE DEEDLES, JOHNNY TSUNAMI), hockey (SLAP SHOT 2: BREAKING THE ICE), and musketeering (LA FEMME MUSKETEER). Since then he’s mostly directed TV, most recently The Old Man.

The screenplay is by Ken Solarz (CITY OF INDUSTRY), Bart Baker (LIVE WIRE) and Keith Alan Bernstein.

This is a movie that feels more specifically of-the-aughts than most in this series. I did not recognize any of the bands on the soundtrack, but they include Ozomatli, Powerman 5000 and someone called Socialburn. The end credits were a contemporary country song, so I turned it off.

In addition to Clear Channel, SUPERCROSS was produced by Tag Studios, a company formed by boy band creator Lou Pearlman and family film producer Steve Austin (THE SANTA TRAP, MIRACLE DOGS, MOTOCROSS KIDS). Austin produced five more movies in the next few years, during which time Pearlman was found to have perpetrated what was then thought to be the longest-running Ponzi scheme in American history, defrauding investors out of more than $1 billion. He tried to flee but was arrested in Indonesia in 2007. He would still be in prison to this day but he had health problems and died in 2016. His legacy lives on in the many boy bands he discovered and ripped off and in this movie that I’m sure he worked very hard on.