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 iders", a movie about four tight-knit thieves
(supposedly) under 30 who uses their extreme sports ability to stick it to The
Man by robbing them and giving to their retirement fund, does these things
wrong:
The thieves are
distinctive looking: One is white with spiked blond hair; the other is a woman
with wild blonde hair; a third is a big black guy named "Otis"; and
the fourth guy is tall, thin, and has a goatee and looks a lot like Tom Green.
Our clever thieves wear masks, but never bothers to keep
them on for very long, which means the people they're robbing invariably will
see all of their faces at one point or another.
Our thieves perform about 5 daring heists in the whole
movie, all in the same city and a few days apart, and yet no one has ever heard
of a police sketch artist and their pictures never appear on TV. Also, they hang
out at the same extreme sports place.
Actor Bruce Payne, in a bid to embarrass himself beyond
recognition, embarrasses himself beyond recognition as a thickheaded police
detective who turns out to be -- gasp! -- in actuality a bad guy who
forces our thieves to do robberies for him. And he seems to have a mouthful of
something, because his dialogue sounds like he's trying to chew and talk at the
same time.
Natasha Henstridge plays an ace detective who, after
sleeping with Stephen Dorff's lead thief, discovers by way of a video capturing
one of the foursome's robberies that Dorff's character was involved. (She
notices a tattoo on the back of his neck, not the fact that he and his comrades
expose their faces to just about everyone.) But instead of telling her fellow
cops or arresting Dorff, Henstridge confronts Dorff and warns him that she'll
"come after him with everything she's got", which leaves me to wonder:
Gee, Natasha, why didn't you arrest him now?
Steven Berkoff ("Children
of Dune"), in a bid to out-embarrass co-star Bruce Payne, plays a
Southern preacher with a pompadour who -- gasp! -- actually works for a
criminal organization as a fixer. And yes, he also goes around using some
ungodly Southern accent that only an English writer like Mark Ezra and a French
director like Gerard Pires ("Taxi") could fail to see as a prime
example of ignorant foreigners trying to "do American".
Minus closing credits, "Riders" is 73 minutes
long.
All of the above adds up to a stuntman's "how to"
video in the guise of a movie. "Riders" was directed by a Frenchman
and co-written by an Englishman. It stars mostly American actors, led by Stephen
Dorff ("Blade")
and Natasha Henstridge ("Ghosts
of Mars"). On the whole, everyone besides Dorff and the actors playing
his 3 comrades-in-arms manages to embarrass themselves. Of course, it doesn't
help that they're working from a minimal screenplay and the movie itself exists
in a strange American city where the cops are called "Metro cops" and
there's never any landmarks of note.
Director Gerard Pires is less interested in making a movie
than he is about shooting a series of neato stunts involving inline skates, a
lot of police cars crashing into things, semi-trucks doing wheelies, and not one
but two armored trucks. The cinematography by Tetsuo Nagata is slick in
that MTV music video way. So much of the film has been chopped off that all that
remains is brief exposition scenes leading to lengthy stunts where the thieves'
idea of "clever" planning reeks of simplicity and improbability.
The film would probably work best if one were to
fast-forward through all of the talky scenes and just watch the stunts. At least
this way there would be less time to recognize the futility of such a ridiculous
movie.
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