PREMISE
The story of the Midwestern motorcycle club the Vandals. A club that starts with good intentions, but unknowingly kickstarts a growing dangerous underworld of violence.
THE GOOD STUFF
Tom Hardy– A part of me kind of believes that Hardy is coasting throughout his performance in this film. And even still, he manages to have the best performance, and he makes his character by far the most interesting thing in the film. I’ve always admired how Hardy fully physically embodies every character in every film that he does.
Here he has a strange Chicago-ish accent, everything involving his mannerisms is slightly over-animated, and it’s all for the best. Tom Hardy never is the same guy in his films. And that has to be a wonderful tool for a director to have even if the film is bad.
JODIE COMER- Comer is quickly ascending to greatness. I haven’t seen a truly bad performance of hers yet, and even at this point in her career, time after time she is proven to be able to outperform subpar material as the great ones tend to do.
She is very much the main character of this film as well as its narrator. The best scenes of this film are her narration scenes/interviews. The film is very much about telling the audience what happens and not showing them and she’s the instrument that the film uses for all that. I was annoyed by all of the info-dumping at first, but she’s just so damn charming.
THE BAD STUFF
TRYING TO BE MARTY- Bikeriders is a film that Scorsese has made a couple of times now. He’s made really famous movies about men who are either involved with certain occupations, or who start culturally transcendent movements that come to define the times that they’re in. (Wolf of Wall street, goodfellas, casino, etc etc etc) All of the movies where Marty covers this ground usually clock in at the two and a half hour mark, and I do feel that is because of a particular reason.
What is the reason, you ask? It’s simple: He explains why the culturally transcendent thing that the movie is about is f****** important. By doing so, he justifies the motivations of every character enough to the point where you can be a little on the spot with your dialogue when explaining a backstory or two. That doesn’t happen here though, and it collapses quickly.
THE UGLY STUFF
BENNY- Austin Butler is a man capable of great things. Up until this point, I don’t know if I’ve ever considered any of his performances bad. However, his performance is bad in this film not because of what he’s doing, but rather what he isn’t doing.
This movie keeps telling you that his character Benny is a natural-born leader, an endlessly charismatic figure who’s the toughest guy in the whole club. A man whose charms are so irresistible that women want him even though he doesn’t say anything and grown-ass men consider him to be a leader even though he has all but two paragraphs worth of dialogue in the entire film.
And while all that is happening, Benny is a coward, he’s not an intelligent person, he’s not exactly loyal to a fault for a good purpose, he is laughably reckless, quick-tempered, and basically doesn’t have any redeemable qualities. This entire performance is basically that scene from Tangled where Flynn Ryder tries to woo his way out of being captured by hitting the princess with…… The smolder.
You really could have grabbed any unknown actor out of the blue to play this role in the exact same way that Butler does here. Literally anybody.
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I also feel that this movie is going to hit differently for sons of anarchy fans. Anybody who watched that show will understand that this movie is attempting to cover a lot of the same beats in less than 2 hours and it is simply not possible. If you are a fan of that show, you know exactly what beats they need to hit to build the world. And even if you liked everything else about this movie, I don’t know how it would be possible to come away knowing that there was just way too much ground to cover here.
Given the cast of this film, this is almost a profoundly disappointing watch. I really looked forward to this one, and it drops the ball in a major way.Â
THE BIKERIDERS is in theaters now.