Torque is The Fast and The Furious but with motorbikes. That is the kind of in depth criticism you come to Do You See? for. It is all you need to know if you are considering seeing it. It is not as good as The Fast And The Furious, but it is better than Too Fast Too Furious (and considerably less gay). Martin Henderson in the lead is about as pretty as Paul Walker, but comes across as having a bit of a brain. Not in his handling of the fiendishly complex double crossing plot, no in his handling of that he comes across as thoroughly stupid. But you get the feeling that this might be acting. In the respectable bad guy role Ice Cube purses his lips far too much, but then he has just realised that this is the start of a run of playing Vin Diesel’s sloppy seconds. He will be taking over xXx2, xXxxXx or whatever that will be called.
Enough of the acting, though for a dumb movie it has an awful lot of actors. And a lot of awful actors. No, all you should be interested in are the bikes and the stunts. For which the film is adequate. One decent girl on girl bike fight and some nonsense with a train are the fun bits. The biggest let down is the finale with ‘the fastest motorbike in the world’, which looks a bit like a shiny breeze-block on wheels. It turns out it is so fast that it was not worth expending any decent special effects money on its chase. Instead it appears they have just sped up five minutes of Grand Theft Auto, and topped it with an explosion. The super-bike is a let down, looking worse than and being considerably slower than its mid-eighties equivalent, Street Hawk. Put it like this, in a flat out race between the two wheeled equivalent of Knight Rider, or this Y2K monstrosity, the eighties would win hands down. These recent bikes, they’re all Torque*.
*The film loses a bit of its street cred for not doing this joke itself.