Torque is essentially the same story as The Fast and the Furious, but told with motorcycles. And it’s 2 goofy 2 be any good.
The Ring’s Martin Henderson stars as Ford, a renegade cyclist who ditched his girlfriend (Monet Mazur, too clean-scrubbed to convincingly play white trash) for a romp in Thailand after stealing some motorcycles with crystal meth in the gas tanks from a sniveling, mullet-sporting bad guy named Henry James (not the author of The Turn of the Screw, but Matt Schulze from The Transporter). Now, Ford is back to set things straight with Henry and the feds.
Only it ain’t that easy because he’s also pursued by a rival biker gang known as The Reapers, led by a snarling Ice Cube, who thinks Ford has murdered his brother, because that’s just what Henry wants everyone to believe. And while that may resemble a plot, the script does nothing to forward it. Oh, the characters talk, all right — it’s just everything they say is meaningless, like the words of Charlie Brown’s school teacher, unless it’s a priceless gem of bad dialogue. This movie is jam-packed with exchanges like “Nice bike.” “Nice ass.”
Nice try. With its saturated, slightly washed-out colors, I liked the way Torque looks. I just didn’t like how it sounds, feels, tastes or smells. Every frame is jacked-up and pimped out to resemble a Mountain Dew commercial. Every character lacks peripheral vision and a hearing range beyond two feet so that people and motorcycles can sneak up on them all the time, yet the dudes have no trouble communicating with one another during their loud rides.
But action is the hook for a flick like Torque — unfortunately, it’s ludicrous. Cycles zip and zap everywhere, including through a moving train filled with passengers, but the climactic chase has Ford and Henry James facing off through downtown L.A. at 200 mph and having somehow obtained expert reflexes. This scene flies by at such speed that you cannot tell what the hell is happening … and maybe that’s for the best. —Rod Lott
It’s not a terrible idea for a film, but director John Woo and company have steered it down that road. Woo’s Asian sensibilities simply do not translate well to American film; his direction is needlessly showy, making for choppy editing, awkward pacing and poor performances. Plus, when he manages — even in a sci-fi thriller — to throw a shot of his beloved white doves, I had to groan.
No one writes a cop novel like Joseph Wambaugh, so it’s no wonder Hollywood has adapted so many of them, starting with 
There’s a reason they call it a beat: because it wears one down. Like Wambaugh’s excellent, reality-based novels, Richard Fleischer’s film pulls back the veil of being an officer, presenting a portrait that’s not at all gussied-up, revealing the repercussions of making an honest but deadly mistake, and the toll the job takes at home. A scene in which the wrong guy is fatally shot is powerful, but most tense is when the police attempt to wrest an abused newborn from its drunk mother. 
1. Lucy N. Easy