Torque goes nowhere fast

Torque: the moment of a force; the measure of a force's tendency to produce torsion and rotation about an axis, equal to the vector product of the radius vector from the axis of rotation to the point of application of the force and the force vector.

Yeah. That's how exciting the movie is.

Yes, you've got your roller-coaster-ride cinematography. Yes, you've got your boomtacular explosions. Yes on the acrobatics, the high speed chase scenes, the testosterone-powered tussles. But Torque is just another obnoxiously ordinary adrenaline overdose. So no matter how many Wachowskinated spectacles are stuffed into this flick, it still ends up nothing more than a tired blockbuster wannabe.

But Torque doesn't care. It basks in its own guy movie glory: Motorcycles. Hot chicks. Good guys. Bad guys. Guns. That's pretty much the whole plot.

But if you want more specifics, there are more clichés. There's the Hunky Hero Man (Martin Henderson), his Ethnic Buddies (Jay Hernandez and Will Yun Lee), the Well-Embosomed Blonde (Monet Mazur), the Slimy Villain (Matt Schulze), and the Angry N-Word Prone Gangsta (Ice Cube). Get that last man to ease up on the Thug-o-meter; he suffers from Too Hood For His Own Good Syndrome. Thus he spends most of the movie ready to bust an angry cap in our Hero, who was framed by the Villain for killing the Gangsta's brother. When the Hero flees, he becomes a fugitive from the authorities, trying to prove his innocence while trying to stay alive.

That's it. There's no more plot left.

Torque comes down to being every other action movie you've seen, with an especially large focus on speed. (Maybe the producers haven't heard, but there was already a sequel to The Fast and the Furious.) Almost the entire cast rides motorcycles, which proves to be occasionally fun, but overall ridiculous. For a movie with a title based on physics, it sure defies a lot of them. A bike that goes from 0 to 200 mph in ten seconds just doesn't exist. A jump from a ramp onto a moving train doesn't work out either, which is probably why the CGI stuntman replaces Henderson in that scene. But then, Torque isn't looking for us to take it seriously. In fact, it turns into a videogame in the quasi-climactic action scene, zooming down Virtual Blvd, zipping and whizzing and rocketing between Pixar cars and trucks.

And that's only one example of how the movie suffers from a bad case of zoomitis. The gaping void sucked dry of content is filled with nonstop zooming camerawork. Zoom in. Zoom out. Zoom through. Zoom around. Zoom a loop-de-loop. It becomes an obsession, trying to cover up the fact that the action is as weak as the plot. Unoriginal? Zig it. Unexciting? Zag it. It's nauseating.

And loud. On top of all the dizziness, Torque bombards its audience with headache-inducing motor racket, somehow mistaking the sound of lawnmowers on crack as manly. The movie has enough vroom, boom, and zoom to literally explode. Don't be surprised if your movie screen spontaneously combusts.

Or, to be on the safe side, just don't see the film.

Torque is rated PG-13 for violence, sexuality, language and drug references.