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If ever there is a museum dedicated to the delicate art of the motorcycle film, an entire wing must be reserved for the glorious spectacle known as Torque. If there is ever a museum dedicated to the form of extreme cinema that doesn’t give a damn if its audience is able to keep up with what is happening on screen, it should be called The Museum of Torque. Music video director, Joseph Kahn, who recently made the uber-weird video for Britney Spears’ “Toxic,” Torque rewrote the book on what it means to go totally over the top. It seems like it could’ve been written by someone doing a back flip on a BMX bike. Endless rapid cuts of motorcycles, dials, faces, eyeballs, rearview mirrors, pistons and things flying through the air accompany constant, blaring heavy metal music. Torque was not made to satisfy viewers looking for fancy things like plot, character development or social messages. Torque’s desire is only to be the loudest, fastest, most babe-packed, most ridiculously dizzying motorcycle flick ever produced.
The plot may be irrelevent, but pay attention to the things coming out of characters’ mouths. Almost every line in the film is pure gold. Ford asks that immortal question, “What is it about driving cars that makes you all such assholes?” At a biker dude version of an art fair, where bikini babes drink from hoses and seem to get sexual pleasure from washing bikes with giant sponges, people use pickup lines like, “Nice bike, nice ass!” If I knew that line a few years ago, I would be like Hugh Hefner right now. When you hear the line, “I gotta get that bike, I gotta get that bitch,” you know you are getting close to Torque’s legendary final twenty minutes. We start by seeing Ford find the Y2K bike, which we all know is the fastest motorcycle in the world because it has a “helicopter jet engine.” Soon after that, all hell breaks loose and Shane has a showdown with the evil Hot Topic reject bike babe, China (Jaime Pressly). One could look at this scene as amazing because these two characters are fighting each other using their bike’s front wheels as fists, but more amazing is the fact that whenever the ladies are shown, giant ads for either Mountain Dew or Pepsi fill the screen behind them. No subtle pop machines hidden in the background—these billboards fill the entire screen. While this is going on, Ford and Henry have a race to the death on bikes going about a gajillion miles per hour that make parking meters explode and, of course, make women’s skirts fly up. During this final showdown of good and evil, Henry pushes a button on his bike. As he does this, the camera zooms in on the button, inside the bike, through the engine, through his body and eventually leaves through the back of his skull. Right after that, there’s a huge explosion and Henry dies. Now I’ve seen Torque about four times, and have even watched it with director commentary, and I still can’t tell just how the evil Henry dies in this scene. Ford’s Y2K bike flips through the air, a button is pushed, big explosion, and then it’s over. What exactly happens, the world may never know. First-time
director Kahn admits during the DVD commentary that he really didn’t
know what he was doing during the film’s production, and it
shows in the most beautiful way. After Warner Bros. shelved the
film for almost a year for extensive reshooting, Torque
was finally released last January to almost zero attention. Having
just recently been released on DVD, Torque is now able
to spread its wings and find that brave audience willing to bring
Y2K bikes, Cary Ford, and cell phones that attach to helmets into
the privacy of their homes. Those willing to turn Torque up as loud
as it can go may never be the same. Just don’t send me the
hospital bills. A2P
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