All in all, “Torque” is so rank and the acting so horrendous it makes a Brooklyn-accented alley cat with the last name “Gigli” and his Selena-turned-lesbian love interest look Oscar-worthy.
To one Richard Daniel Raney:
Old friend, forgive me for my shortcomings. I had no way of knowing legendary producer Neal Moritz could dip so low when I persuaded you to tag along with me for a 9:55 p.m. showing of “Torque” last Friday evening.
Truth be told, Moritz’s previous attempts at the cinematic aesthetic had yielded nothing but luscious fruit. For example, consider the tour de force “I Still Know What You Did Last Summer,” perhaps the creepiest film ever made, period. Throw in the most ingenious script I’ve come across in many a moon, dating all the way back to “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation,” and you’ve got yourself a surefire spine twitch.
OK, OK, the preceding paragraphs were about as realistic as the campaign poster, “Vote Kucinich Because He Hates Spinach.”
In all honesty, Rick, the mistake we made with “Torque” was that contemporary biker movies simply are not one-fifth of what they were yesteryear. Oh, lord have mercy, where have the glorious days of “Chrome and Hot Leather,” “Cycle Savages” and “Angel Unchained” vanished to? It is no wonder the Hell’s Angels numbers have been steadily shrinking with such cheese ball rubbish as “Biker Babes from Beyond the Grave” making it into theaters.
It seems obvious “Torque” is nothing more than a suped-up commercial with a running time of 81 minutes. Hell, Rick, all throughout I saw the actors munching on Doritos, sipping Mountain Dew and even fighting to the backdrop of a Pepsi banner. The sequence at the biker-fest was virtually identical to Kid Rock’s music video “Bawitdaba,” with flaunty babes of all sorts, hard-boiled bikers sucking gasoline, and midgets to boot.
With hackneyed phrases stolen from previous Moritz productions such as “The Fast and the Furious,” a film of such value as “Torque” must rely on its special effects. It fails miserably. Half of the time, I didn’t have the faintest idea as to what was unfolding before me. I must have erupted into frenzied laughter a hundred times.
What’s even more humorous about “Torque” is its inadvertent homage to the cybernetic organism T-1000 found in James Cameron’s blockbuster “Terminator 2: Judgment Day.” The not-so-corrupt FBI agent is shot repeatedly in every quadrant of the upper torso. Then she blows herself and her shady partner sky-high by detonating a warehouse full of crystal meth. Only strange thing is that while her partner has been blown to bits, she escapes with hardly a scratch. I figure she must be constituted of a futuristic liquid alloy.
All in all, “Torque” is so rank and the acting so horrendous it makes a Brooklyn-accented alley cat with the last name “Gigli” and his Selena-turned-lesbian love interest look Oscar-worthy.
