Ray Pride

When Jean-Luc Godard teased that a movie needed a beginning, middle and end, but not necessarily in that order, he hadn't seen "Torque."

Linear but loony, this eighty-one minute cavalcade of self-mocking attitude, fast cuts and motorcycle-chase mayhem is the flash and the spurious, all the color of candy and fireworks: it's modern moviemaking as a Red Bull and Milk Dud headrush. Biker Cary Ford (Martin Henderson) skips town and hides out in Thailand; six months later he returns to reconnect with the girlfriend he left behind, motorcycle mechanic Shane (Monet Mazur), but also to straighten out some misunderstanding he's caused between two biker gangs, the white, drug-dealing Hellions, led by Henry (Matt Schulze), some of whose property Ford swiped, not knowing the motorcycles in question conceal a million dollars in crystal meth. (One, it's pointed out, has a "Rolls-Royce Jet Helicopter engine.") Henry frames Ford for the murder of the berserk younger brother of Trey (Ice Cube), leader of black biker gang The Reapers. Ford has his own followers, one Asian American, one Latino, and there's the matter of a smart-aleck FBI agent on his trail as well. (There's something like twenty lead and secondary characters.) But we know by now with a movie like this, the plot's immaterial, it's an excuse to make pictures and blow shit up. Everybody's pretty--the men perhaps more than the women--it's a boy cheekbone fiesta.

"Torque" is like a Mobius strip: wherever you walk in, the camera is willing itself into a Tourettic spasm, indulging some sort of intricate trick of reframing or using computer-generated images to go in wildly improbable, often impossible places. (It's almost as if this was Kahn's product reel to get work as a special-effects supervisor.) When David Fincher began "Fight Club" inside a character's neurons and threaded his camera through the handle of a coffeemaker in "Panic Room," the effect was smirky but smart; in "Fast and the Furious," (from the same producer as "Torque") gunning through the entrails of souped-up engines was Rob Cohen's way of saying, "Yo! Over here! Look at me, too!" First-time director Joseph Kahn, who's made over 200 videos, calls his production company SuperMega and that's a good neologism to describe the relentless ADD style of the mad, manic movie he's put on screen. It's comprehensibly incomprehensible, as unstable as a flask of nitroglycerine; a minor apocalypse that comes in all the same colors as Gatorade. In case the shamelessly busy, amped-up pace doesn't cross your eyes, Kahn accompanies his supermega-sped-up bits of footage with cartoon whoops and whooshes.

It's amazing how many tricks clatter down his sleeve. "Torque" is practically a playbook of focal lengths and how to layer multicolored compositions. The work by Kahn and cinematographer Peter Levy ("24") boasts dynamism that's more Hong Kong go-for-broke than video-game flatness, striving, with eye-popping success, for volcanic propulsiveness. At least the stick figures still have human faces and own puppy dogs.

Still, they are saddled with lines like "I love you, you're my brother." But actors like Ice Cube do have their sub-iconic fun with scowls and tooth-sucking sounds. Plus the spectacle of Henry's Goth moll, China, a virtually wordless Jaime Pressly sausaged into black leather and purple eyeshade, given to licking suggestively at her lip ring like it's a persistent cold sore.

It's dime-store decadence. Could Kahn be a Fincher, a David Lynch (there's a repeated Lynchian shot of a light bulb swaying in a widescreen dimness of red)? It's hard to guess from a movie that could bear the credit, "Adapted From A Bowl of Lucky Charms & Bailey's Irish Crème." "Torque" revs through an alternate universe where Budweiser longnecks are as ubiquitous as the Pepsi-Cola logo. Oh, spoke too soon, there's a Pepsi. There's a Diet Pepsi in the FBI agent's hand. And: a dead-center widescreen close-up in which a Bud longneck that's just been used to smash in someone's face lands upright in the attacker's hand--whew! --the brew's been saved. The bikers wear Schott leathers or Ramones, Motorhead and Metallica black-T's and Mazur's flat belly and peeping black thong recur. It's so beyond cynicism, this juvenile trashiness, a transgressiveness that does not quite challenge the teenage imagination. For instance, there's a sustained on-bike catfight between Pressly and her adversary, and in a reverse angle, we see a Pepsi billboard behind one, Mountain Dew behind the other. It gets a laugh, this Extreme Product Placement.

"Amazing what you can do when you have no choice," is one character's modest mouthful that sums up Kahn's approach. Is "Torque" the future? (A coproducer gushes in the press kit that Kahn's' videos are "amazing, totally cutting edge.") In veteran director John Boorman's new memoir, "Adventures of a Suburban Boy," he marvels at what movies he and other directors will be able to make amid the rubble and ruins of the insanely costly contemporary studio system. In the meantime? There's "Torque."

"Torque" is now spinning.

(2004-01-13)

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