DVD Review: Hell Ride

As twilight descends on Quentin Tarantino’s contribution to nineties American cinema, fewer filmmakers are writing scripts with a copy of Pulp Fiction’s in hand for reference. A new filmmaker might reason that Tarantino is so successfully parodying himself these days that they’d be making a copy of a copy and it’s hardly worth it. But for those still in thrall to the magpie’s ouveur and determined to make knock off versions of the movies that electrified 90’s audiences, there’s still one man in Hollywood who’s willing to back them – er, Quentin Tarantino.

Hell Ride is such a movie – a low rent affair produced by Tarantino and the Weinsteins and featuring Dennis Hopper, the late David Carradine and Michael Madsen in parts so slight that you can imagine their participation was gained for a modest outlay of girls, grams and glug, probably at a private party in the Hollywood hills. In any event they seem content to turn up and do impressions of themselves here.

The credits say Larry Bishop, but Hell Ride looks to have been written using the QT plugin for B.A.N.G – the B-movie Action Narrative Generator. It’s a piece of Hollywood software so well developed that a single script can be generated in seconds and it’s lifeless synthetic fingerprints are all over the derivative and sometimes incomprehensible screenplay.

From the outset it’s the familiar Tarantino-Rodriquez formula of Spanish guitars, Latino beauties, dust and damage, with a threadbare plot centred on revenge and rival biker gangs. Hunter S Thompson wrote about Hell’s Angels but nowhere in his journal of life on the open road is the Devil’s credo summed up as “bikes, beer and booty.” Mind you, Thompson was writing in the 60s and it’s possible the biking fraternity has taken Beyonce on as a consultant since then but we’re never told.

The riders have tags like “the Comanche” and “The Gentleman” as sort of lazy shorthand for their characters, but characterisation is non-existent. Writer and Director Larry Bishop, with one postmodern eye on proceedings, has written a script which wants to be instantly quotable and sell T-shirts but is devoid of wit or coherence. It does often sound like Tarantino; unfortunately this is Tarantino as he writes today, rather than in his hungry heyday.

The monologues are infuriatingly repetitious and pointless so exchanges between characters often sound like a couple of drunks trying to have a philosophical conversation after 12 pints. You’re reminded of Walter Matthau’s crack from The Odd Couple 2, where he turns to Jack Lemmon and says “Do you know, we’ve been using analogies for so long I can’t remember what we were actually talking about.”

Self-conscious chatter that aims for cool but ends up as stool is one thing, but the performances grate in similar fashion. The men, including Vinny Jones as a gang leader who sounds like he’s doing Clint Eastwood, deliver their lines with a faux machismo and gruffness that resembles a set of auditions for trailer voice over artists. Women don’t fare well either. When they’re allowed to speak they sound like refugees from a porn movie and when they’re not talking dirty, they’re to be ogled or burned, suggesting that Bishop is either an outrageous misogynist or he assumes his audience to be. In either case, there’s a poverty of ideas for both sexes and essentially the story is an anthology of dick waving that teases out an underpowered narrative over 86 uninvolving minutes.

Bishop told Tarantino that he wanted to make the ultimate biker movie and he has in part, succeeded. If the aim was to bounce the viewer into abandoning movies, getting on a bike and hitting the open road, then Hell Ride hits the mark. Those who like their pictures smart, sexy and cool can safely ride over this one.

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