Da Bears. Da bikes.
BQB here with a review of this kick ass macho flick.
Ahh, woke Hollywood. You suck. Really you do. You manage to ruin everything, so I want to thank you for keeping your greasy tentacles off this quality picture. Apparently, you were too busy turning the much beloved Star Wars franchise into a haven for furiously scissoring space lesbian witches that you didn’t get around to mess up this movie, and thus I was able for once in I don’t know how long to enjoy a good old fashioned dude fest, complete with bar brawls, fist fights, gun play, police chases, and bikes that go vroom vroom.
It’s an age old tale about how, if you have anything good, sooner or later, yahoo assholes are going to show up to tear it apart. Tom Hardy and Austin Butler star as Johnny and Benny, two fouding members of the Chicago Vandals Motorcycle Club in the early 1960s. At first, it’s a club for outcast gearheads to hangout, get drunk, party, and have fun with likeminded misfits who don’t fit in anywhere else.
But alas, a decade later, the club grows in size and popularity, inviting rougher, tougher, seedier reprobates than Johnny and Benny can handle. What began as a social club has turned into a haven for bloodthirsty psychopaths.
Alas, this club is their life, their reason for being, a way to share the open road with their compadres. And sure, yes, they did a lot of messed up, penny ante minor crimes, but is there any way they can save their club and their way of life from being stolen out from under them by violent monsters who just live to kill, rape, pillage, loot, plunder, murder and so on?
Double alas, this film came out early in the year. Oddly, it’s classified as a 2023 film though it came out to a wide release in theaters this weekend in 2024. At any rate, I doubt it will get much Oscar love because it deserves some. The way Tom Hardy and Jodie Comer completely transform themselves into different people is amazing. Yes, I know that’s what actors/actresses do but they take it to another level.
The Chicago accents are off the charts in this film, such that they remind me of that old SNL sketch where the superfans talked about Da Bears and Da Bulls. So get ready for that. Tom and Jodie go deep into said accents. Jodie, who you may remember as the love interest in Free Guy, steals the show as Benny’s girlfriend.
If you expect her to play a tough, gun toting biker moll, you’d be wrong. She actually narrates the film, telling the story to a reporter played by Mike Faist (he of one third of the menage a trois in Challengers) and apparently the real life biker club did have a reporter follow them around.
Jodie’s Kathy is a semi-humorous, with just a touch of SNL-esque version of a biker girlfriend, playing up the “what the heck am I doing with these jerks?” angle to the hilt. Note I said semi because it’s not so comical that it turns the film to a comedy, but she becomes the character that the (we can only assume) mostly law abiding audience can relate to. She is absolutely disgusted by the obnoxious behavior of the boorish clowns her boyfriend hangs out with, and complains about their antics vociferously throughout the film, yet in the end, loves Benny so much that she can pry herself away from him.
Jodie truly steals the show and this is a great star vehicle for her. This is one of those films where you say, “who is that actress?” and suddenly, you realize you’ve seen her in other films but this one got you to remember her name.
Bonus points for actors from other tough guy shows, like Damon Herriman (Dewey Crowe from Justified), Norman Reedus (Daryl in the Walking Dead) and of course, the uber weird Michael Sherridan.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy. It just goes to show, 3.5 readers, if you ever build something good, some schmuck will inevitably pop out of the woodwork to try to take it from you.
Bookshelf Battle 