First there was The Fast and the Furious, then 2 Fast 2 Furious, and now there’s Torque, which is essentially the same tale but told with motorcycles. And it’s 2 goofy 2 be any good.

The Ring’s Martin Henderson stars as Ford, because Kurt Russell is 20 years too old to be doing so. He’s a renegade cyclist who ditched his girlfriend Shane (Monet Mazur, who’s too clean-scrubbed to convincingly play white trash and looks like Mary-Louise Parker with a dye job) for a romp in Thailand after stealing some motorcycles with crystal meth in the gas tanks from a sniveling bad guy named Henry James (not the famous author of The Turn of the Screw, but Matt Schulze from The Transporter). Like all the bad guys in real life, he sports a mullet. But now he’s back to set things straight with both Henry James and the feds.

Only it ain’t that easy because he’s also pursued by a rival biker gang known as The Reapers, led by Ice Cube (forever frowning and snarling his way through a terrible performance), who thinks Ford has murdered his brother, because that’s just what Henry James wants everyone to believe. And while that may resemble a plot, the script does nothing to forward it. Oh, the characters talk alright – it’s just everything they say is meaningless, like the words of Charlie Brown’s school teacher, unless it’s a priceless bit of bad dialogue. This movie is jam-packed with exchanges like “Nice bike.”
“Nice ***censored***.”

Nice try. With its saturated, slightly washed-out colors, I liked the way Torque looks. I just didn’t like how it sounds, feels, tastes or smells. Every frame is jacked-up and pimped out to resemble a Mountain Dew commercial. Every character lacks peripheral vision and a hearing range beyond two feet so that people and motorcycles can sneak up on them all the time, yet the dudes have no trouble communicating with one another during their loud rides.

But action is the hook for a flick like Torque – unfortunately, it’s ludicrous. Cycles zip and zap everywhere, including through a moving train filled with passengers, but the climactic chase has Ford and Henry James facing off through downtown L.A. at 200 mph and having somehow obtained expert reflexes. This scene flies by at such speed that you cannot tell what the hell is happening
– like much of the movie, it’s as close as a film can get to being animated without using pencils.

Rod Lott writes about pop culture, annoying celebrities and life’s other absurdities every day at Hitch Daily and he also publishes the long-running Hitch:The Journal of Pop Culture Absurdity which is actually made out of paper.