I suffered through an hour of this before I got up and walked out. If you are looking for a motorcycle film, this is not it. Torque was better and that was pure drivel.
Here’s my review from IMDB.
Perhaps I’m the wrong audience but I got absolutely nothing from this film, but perhaps that’s because there was nothing to gain. No history, no substance, no plot. It was just an agonising string of tedious dialogue. This film is a bit like meeting your friends at a pub or bar, only turning up 4 hours late after they’ve all had a skinful then sitting there stone cold sober while they talk drivel at you. I left after one hour because I couldn’t waste any more of my life on it.
I suppose one positive is that whether you are a motorcycle enthusiast or not the film is equally dreadful so it doesn’t discriminate.
Tom Hardy is an entirely unconvincing gang leader. He should have stopped at Legend as he was ok in that.
Everything in this film will annoy you. The dialogue, the accents, the constant smoking of cigarettes, (by people clearly not comfortable smoking cigarettes). The list goes on. One film critic compared it to Goodfellas. Well that would be true if Goodfellas was dreadful.
You might want to sit though this as an endurance test but other than that I wouldn’t waste your time.
From what I understand this has less to do with motorcycling per se as it’s based on a seminal photojournalistic study of biker gangs. I have the feeling you went in expecting to see something and got something completely different (that might be unfair though…)
I’ve seen good reviews by my favourite movie critic and also studied some ethnographic literature of US motorbike gangs during my time at uni, so I’m going to definitely give it a watch.
Having said all that, movie opinions are all valid as what one person likes, another doesn’t. A bit like how Tarkovsky is considered a master but I would rather take my eyeballs out with a spoon and eat them
I’d be interested to hear what you think. I thought the portrayal of biker gangs was pretty poor too. There must have been some smart people in the ranks but none of that was shown here. Just a series of picnics and drinking.
I do wonder if we’ve been so caught up with modern biker gangs and how complicated they have become, and how romanticised they have been in things like Sons of Anarchy that we forget that in the 60s, it must have been (don’t know) still pretty chaotic as a scene in it’s infancy.
I need to watch it now to comment further but I have to wait until it comes onto a streaming platform as there’s zero chance of me getting to the cinema!
