Review of Hell Ride (2008) by Grant S — 12 Mar 2015

I'd like to open up with the fact, that I'm going to rate this film in a terribly biased manner, based on one simple fact. A simple fact of just two words. Gothic. Strippers. Yeah, there's a strip club somewhere out in the desert full of rather attractive punk and goth girls wearing little to no clothing. But without any further ado, here's my actual review of Hell Ride.

There's a couple of Tarantino greats in this film, plus a lot of his flair in the cinematography, but you could tell from the script he had very little to do with the film itself. I was counting on Vinnie Jones to hold it all together, and though he was pretty good, it was a bad role for him. So much of his power and charisma comes from the fact that he's a bad ass Brit and the character of Billy Wings was all American Male, which just didn't work. It was actually Michael Madsen playing The Gent (in the photo above) who stole the show.

The fact that every character was a 1%er, meant that none of them were particularly likeable. But it's the sort of movie were it doesn't matter quite so much. The "Sugar" or emotion of the piece was somewhat... lacking. They have this whole mother/son-revenge-betrayal-tearjerker thing going on, but honestly it was hardly worth it. They didn't put enough effort in, they just took up their quite short amount of footage by bothering to include it. I don't know, maybe I missed something but it really seemed a bit of a cop out to me.

Take all the senseless violence, bikes and copious nudity, it's very obvious that this movie's target audience is male. Which I have the good fortune of being. Still though, they're often the movies that you sort of watch once and then leave, but I'll see how it goes. Having the main character also be the person who directed the film can be awkward, so maybe this is part of the reason for some of its short-comings. But you still have to respect the guy for doing both in a full budget film.

If you're looking for a short action film that can't pick its pace, filled with liquor, tits, petrol, testosterone and Western music, then it's pretty perfect, but if you're looking for anything else in a movie, maybe go elsewhere. I didn't really feel it was a waste of time though, and I did enjoy it, just not special.

51%.

-Gimly.