Ostensibly (by which I mean barely) based on a same-named April 2000 article that appeared in this publication's now-defunct sister paper New Times Los Angeles, Biker Boyz feels like the kind of movie Tom Cruise used to make when he was working through his daddy issues in film. The most obvious jumping-off point is Days of Thunder: Kid rebels against mentor in shadow of dead pa, which sounds like everything from Top Gun to Cocktail to Magnolia, come to think of it. Already, Derek Luke, star of Antwone Fisher, is in danger of lapsing into Cruise control in films in which he has profound parenting issues. Only Luke's "Kid" (his character's actual nickname) has to overcome two father figures: the mechanic who raised him (Eriq La Salle, in an uncredited cameo) and the biker boss who won't let Kid out of his sight or shadow (a bulked-up Laurence Fishburne).
All that remains from Michael Gougis' article are a few names and a couple of scenes, including the Fresno drag strip where men work out their competitive issues ten seconds at a time (more, actually, considering the slow-mo). The piece has been stripped and retrofitted to look like a Fox-TV pilot decorated with MTV talk-show hand-me-down sets. Gougis' protagonist was Miguel "Pokey" Galloway, a 42-year-old king of the road nearing the end of his ride, and you saw the world through his glazed and sunken eyes, all the races and chases and fights and funerals. Here, he's renamed "Smoke" Galloway, which is what he's reduced to: Fishburne's Galloway is a bit player in his own story, easily made to disappear with a wave of the hand. We know nothing about him, save that he screws around too much (his fall-back is Lisa Bonet, now looking chiseled to the bone) and that, as the so-called "King of Cali," he can't be beat, least of all by Kid Rock as head of the rival Strays. It was up to Fishburne to flesh out the outline given him by novice writer Craig Fernandez and director-cowriter Reggie Rock Bythewood, but you can't carry something lighter than air.
Bythewood couldn't figure out what he was making: a Peter Fonda biker B-pic or a drama in which fathers and sons made their peace on strips of gravel. The director, best-known for his short stint on A Different World, has so burdened the film with romantic and domestic issues -- Kid's being tugged at by his disapproving mom (Vanessa Bell Calloway), his Romeo and Juliet instant girlfriend (a barely clad Meagan Good), his new and ever-growing posse, not to mention Smoke and the ghost of a daddy -- that to make it feel at all kinetic or even just half-awake, Bythewood resorts to cheap trickery. He whips the camera around as though it's attached to a rubber hose, snakes it between monstrous and shiny bikes that all look the same, distorts the picture whenever we're supposed to be looking at the track from Smoke's point of view, and injects copious montages of still images and grainy footage set to bangin' beats. It's a mild one among biker pics, a tricycle only pretending to be a Hog.
