Movie Review by Nigel A. Messenger
Starring: Martin Henderson, Monet Mazur, Ice Cube, Jay Hernandez, Adam Harrington
Director: Joseph Kahn
TORQUE is a modern day all action movie filmed in the style of 2 FAST 2 FURIOUS. In fact the main difference between the two films is that bikes and bike culture replace the supercharged street cars in 2 FAST 2 FURIOUS.
The story is that biker Cary Ford (Martin Henderson) returns home to get back together with his girlfriend Shane (Monet Mazur) after apparently taking off with several motorbikes belonging to Henry (Matt Schulze) a particularly nasty bike gang leader and drug dealer. Henry wants his bikes back and frames Ford to get them, by killing the brother of Trey (Ice Cube) another rival bike gang leader. So with the two motorcycle gangs and the FBI after him, the chase, as they say, is on!
TORQUE is full of stylized action, some very nice superbikes and extremely hot-looking girls – dressed in revealing leather of course. On the minus side the ultra cool characters do sometimes come out with some trendy but corny lines and the heavy metal guitar soundtrack does tend to go into overdrive.
While TORQUE will never win any Oscars, as a mainstream actioner it’s very good stuff. The stunts are excellent even if reality is often stretched slightly beyond its limit and the girls are a definite plus. For some reason though after spending almost the whole film showing us how well they can execute some great bike stunts and chases, the makers resort to an almost entirely CGI effects chase in the final showdown. In fact the CGI is so obvious in this scene between two of the male leads that you feel you are watching a video game! I can only say – why? Why did the filmmakers film a final climatic chase in this way? The scene uses a rare bike called a Y2K. This is a real bike that sports a jet engine originally designed for a helicopter. There are only ten of these bikes in existence (an eleventh is being built) and I can only guess that they wanted to give the impression of the speed of this bike only it would have been impossible to perform the stunts required at these speeds. The trouble is the scene looks ridiculous and is unnecessary after such good stunts throughout the movie. Fortunately however the previous scene features a climatic chase/battle between the film’s two female leads played by Monet Mazur and Jaime Pressly who both not only look gorgeous on screen but also perform an outstanding and quite violent chase/bike battle sequence. This more than makes up for the following guys CGI finale.
Overall if you like the fast paced action that made 2 FAST 2 FURIOUS you will enjoy TORQUE. It’s got bikes instead of cars, a couple of corny lines you should ignore and slightly more stereotyped characters and a 2-minute CGI sequence that’s better forgotten, but the babes are ultra-hot which easily makes up for these odd variables.
