Things I Learned From Movie X: Torque
By Edwin Davies
May 4, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com

C'mon, you know it's hotter when two the people in a threesome are scuzzy.
It's easy to be cynical sometimes, on account of how the world is a dark and terrible place which will never get any better no matter how hard we try. And I know that I too often fall into that trap with these columns. Why, in a recent poll, Things I Learned From Movie X was found to be the leading cause of cynicism in Sweden. Strange, but not easily disproved.

Today, though, I want to throw off the Dark Cloak of Cynicism in favor of the Rainbow Suspenders of Joy by celebrating the barely-remembered 2004 illegal motorbike racing/action movie Torque. Sure, a film in which Ice Cube is the main selling point has very little chance of being good, at least in the traditional sense, but I found that it's sheer ludicrosity won me over by the end - actually, that's not true; it won me over within the first five minutes - and I think that it could win a lot of other people over, too, if they would just let Torque into their hearts.

The novelization would be like War and Peace, but with motorbikes

Torque is the timeless story of Ford (Martin Henderson), a young biker who is framed for the murder of the brother of Trey (Ice Cube), the leader of a rival gang. At least, that is what it is on the surface, but the film actually seems to be about all the stuff that Ford did before this story starts. It's hard to think of Torque as having a plot of its own because everyone spends all their time talking about everything that happened before. It's a film so concerned with its own past it might as well have been written by Proust.

In fact, the film is as much a meditation on time, aging and how the past shapes us as it is about how driving bikes really fast is fucking cool. The ridiculously convoluted mythology involves Ford stealing bikes from Henry James (Matt Schulze) - note: not the author of The Portrait of a Lady, though you would be forgiven for making such an easy mistake - which, unbeknownst to him, contain crystal meth. This leads him to flee the country for fear of dragging his girlfriend Shane (Monet Mazur) into the quagmire that is his life. The central questions the audience find themselves asking whilst watching Torque - other than "why the hell am I watching Torque?" (Answer: 'Cos it's awesome) - are all about the identity of Ford. Who is he? What did he do? Does what he did in the past define who he is now, and can doing good now undo the bad he did in the past? Ultimately, the film answers this question by saying that, whilst he is a fundamentally good person, Ford will also blow up anyone who gets in his way. Truly, Ford's story is our story.

Torque makes a better argument that train travel is the future than Atlas Shrugged Part 1 ever could

If roughly half of Torque is taken up with talking about the past, the other half is spent very much in the present, with Ford and his United Colors of Benetton teammates tearing across highways, desert and forests in search of adventure and truth. Since they don't try to avoid being spotted by, I don't know, not driving their own bikes out in the open, or at the very least changing out of their signature clothing so that they aren't obviously who they are, most of their driving involves being chased by Trey and his crew, Henry James and his crew, or the somewhat casually dressed FBI agent (Adam Scott. Yes, Adam Scott.) who are after them.

Even though it happens only halfway into the film, Torque's philosophy of making everything into a chase reaches its climax with a moment in which Trey and Ford drive up a ramp and land on a top of a moving train, which they continue to drive along at insanely high speeds. If that wasn't cool enough, Ford at one point drops down between two of the carriages, uses his bike as a battering ram (this moment doesn't bear too much thinking about because the forces and movement involved may require us to rewrite everything we currently believe about physics) then proceeds to drive through the train, almost certainly crushing some of the passengers beneath his wheels. (The film doesn't show this, but I've been on enough trains to know that no one is going to move out of your way, motorbike or not.)

If anyone needed proof that trains are the most thoroughly badass form of transport, that scene stands as Exhibits A through Z. You couldn't drive a motorbike on top of a moving plane or a car, only trains present the perfect combination of size, speed and energy efficiency that the busy biker on the run requires. Also, the snack carts tend to be pretty well stocked these days.

You don't need no book learnin'

I'm a pretty smart guy. I'm not bragging when I say that (and if I am, I am terrible at bragging), it's just something that is a part of who I am. I studied hard, did well at school and went to a fairly good University. ("Fairly good?" Does my braggadocio know no bounds?) Despite this, I sometimes doubt my intelligence. This is partly because, of my close circle of friends, I am one of the few who isn't doing a highly specialized PhD in an obscure and impenetrable area of the sciences, but also because I occasionally do things that are incredibly dumb.

For example, when I go shopping for birthday presents, I tend to use my phone to record anything good that I see. I'll write a quick text message with all the relevant information, then send the text to my own number so that I can consult it later. I did this the other day and, as soon as my phone vibrated to indicate that I had a text, I thought, "Oh, I wonder who this could be?" That's right; I was surprised by a text message that I had sent to myself. I am an idiot. If anyone ever tells you that a liberal arts education prepares you for the real world, tell them my story. Then punch them in the solar plexus. Only if they are a man, though, because as we all know, violence is only hilarious when it's aimed against men. That's why you never hear about The Marx Sisters and the Three Stoogesses, two of the most depressingly violent and ill-advised attempts at brand extension that didn't feature the words "Police Academy."

Now, I won't ever have to feel inadequate again, and neither will you, because whatever we do in life, we can never be dumber than Torque. This is for one simple reason; none of us will never say anything as facepalm-inducingly moronic as the line, spoken by Ford, "I live my life one quarter-mile at a time." Just think about that line. It's almost Zen in its idiocy. I tried thinking about it the other day, lapsed into a transcendental meditation state and ended up having a conversation with The Earth. (It says 'Sup?, by the way.) Some say that Death is the great leveler, others "sitting", but those people have not encountered Torque, and they are poorer for it.