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A Warner Brothers release. Written by Matthew Johnson; directed by Joseph Kahn; starring Martin Henderson, Ice Cube and Monet Mazur. Released to DVD on May 18, 2004.  Halfway through director Joseph Kahn’s movie, Torque I came to the conclusion that I was watching one giant Mountain Dew commercial. The emphasis was on young, good-looking people with a surfer chic fashion sense who spent the greater portion of their day tooling around on motorcycles. It was a character spouting the line, ‘do the dew’ away from a Super Bowl ad. Though Joel Schmacher had worked a McDonald’s reference into his project, Batman Forever, he had also taken a lot of flak for the decision to do so. My guess was, try as they might, Kahn and newly crowned uber-producer, Neal Moritz (The Fast and the Furious, XXX and S.W.A.T.), just couldn’t work the soda tagline into the film. Kahn and Moritz more than made up for the absence of this pop-culture slogan by shooting Torque’s climactic fight sequence between Jaime Pressly and Monet Mazur in front of the largest Mountain Dew billboard known to mankind.
Like the other movies in Moritz’s action stable, the appeal of Torque is extremely evident and not particularly deep. It is an action movie with cool stunts, cooler heroes, hot girls, ugly and nefarious bad guys, and enough enthusiasm and caffeine to stimulate even the most brain dead teenager. Beyond these qualities though, Torque is especially lacking.Thinking is anything but a virtue here. Despite my best efforts to turn my brain off, a coherent thought would occasionally venture forth and temporarily kill whatever entertainment valueTorque held at the time (“Wait, would the LAPD really shut down every major highway in Los Angeles and do individual car searches to find an accused murder suspect?”).
Torque is only 81 minutes long, but what it does it does very well. There is some sort of a plot involving the rebellious, good-hearted and handsome biker, Cary Ford (Martin Henderson) and a mix-up involving a million dollars worth of crystal meth that has Ford on the run, but this is only present to give stunt coordinator Lance Gilbert room to create action sequences involving top-of-the-line crotch-rockets.
The quick edits and accompanying lack of rhythm were to be expected, as were the somewhat average acting performances; frankly, with the dialogue that was written, it’s a credit to the actors that their performances came off as well as they did. The same cannot be said for the production’s heavy-handed reliance on computer-generated (CG) special effects. One of the greater pleasures of Moritz’s past work has been the downright phenomenal live-action stunt work captured on celluloid. Torque differs from these previous films though because of the obvious presence of some element of CG work in most action shots, be it something as small as a digital matte or a poorly compositioned digital car in the foreground. It’s possible these CG elements were present in 2Fast2Furious and Out of Time, I just don’t remember them being as easy to spot.
So, to sum up my thoughts on this project, I revert back three paragraphs. In the grand scheme of cinema, Torque doesn’t do all that much, but what it does, it does well. And for that, young men everywhere will be drinking Mountain Dew.
chris neumer yes, it's true: According to NASA, "torque is the turning effect produced when force is applied to a rotational axis." |
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