Tom Hardy does a weird voice, but on a bike this time
Tom Hardy and Austin Butler growl their way through The Bikeriders, while Russell Crowe returns to exorcism and we all return to Westeros.
The Bikeriders has enough soul and sexuality to get the motor running
There’s a clip from Fast and Furious 6 that goes viral every few months. It shows a weird scene between Dwayne Johnson and Vin Diesel in which the frenemies enter each other’s personal space in the most confounding way possible, crackling with macho performance1. I thought about that moment while watching The Bikeriders, which includes a scene in which Tom Hardy’s biker kingpin Johnny attempts to seduce his wild child protégé Benny (Austin Butler) into taking over the running of the club.
In the hands of filmmaker Jeff Nichols, this scene pulsates with homo-eroticism. On paper, Johnny is offering Benny his role at the top of the macho heap, but subtextually it’s like he’s trying to get him into bed. Their heads are touching and their bodies almost wrapped around each other. It’s a seduction scene in every way, wearing the clothes of Fast and Furious but carrying every bit as much sexual electricity as the churro scene in Challengers.
All this is to say that The Bikeriders carries a tension and a depth much more potent and surprising than its crime thriller surface. It’s a movie about a love triangle, with Benny caught between Johnny’s open road and the potential for domestic bliss with his wife Kathy (Jodie Comer). Kathy actually challenges Johnny directly at one stage, pointing out that “we both love him”. Johnny’s response — his studied physicality twitching almost imperceptibly — tells us everything we need to know.
The movie is an admirably shaggy journey into the heart of a biker gang in 1960s Chicago, inspired by photographer Danny Lyon’s book of the same name. Lyon pops up as a character in the film, played fittingly by Challengers’ Mike Faist, and his interviews with Kathy serve as a slightly perfunctory framing device.
Broadly, The Bikeriders isn’t about blood on the asphalt and gory criminality. It’s about the real reasons men seek out these gangs. Most of the time is spent with a bottle of beer in hand, either in the communal space of a picnic or the dank tedium of the group’s clubhouse. Even when the violence does come, it’s brief and boring — deliberately so. The gang’s rules mean that Johnny can always be challenged for the leadership and he routinely responds to this with the mundane query “fists or knives?”, as if he’s asking a work colleague whether they want tea or coffee.
Hardy’s performance feels bravely self-parodic. Johnny is quite literally inspired by Marlon Brando in The Wild One, so it’s fitting that Hardy’s performance is one of a man who’s trying as hard as he can to exude the effortless cool of Brando’s 50s peak. Everything Johnny does is forced and Hardy carries that beautifully. Even Hardy’s voice, which is so often ridiculed, channels the idea of a man pushing conventional masculinity as hard as he can.
Accents, in fact, are a theme throughout. Comer’s much-discussed twang2 is too unique to be anything other than authentic, while Michael Shannon is transformative in a brief but impactful role as a seasoned biker with thwarted Vietnam ambitions. While Comer’s terrific work holds the movie together, Butler is its smouldering, sexy3 tool of chaos. His could easily have been a very conventional silent psychopath performance, but Butler locates something soulful behind the eyes and the bloodied fists. Benny arguably needs the gang more than anyone else.
The Bikeriders emerges as a compelling depiction of the push-and-pull around American masculinity. While Johnny, Benny and the founding gang members use their bikes to escape from the mundanity of life, the later wave of young bikers wears it like a status symbol to patch over their mental and physical wounds from the disastrous conflict in Vietnam. They need something to reassert their masculinity and they find it in polished chrome fenders and less-polished switchblades.
Nichols’ film is a hugely ambitious take on the well-worn biker narrative and one that relishes its time in the unwittingly truthful shadows created by the outstretched arms and puffed-up chests of the characters. This is a film fascinated by blowing away the acrid smoke, peeling off the denim jackets, and scratching at the fragile masculinity hidden beneath it all.
The Bikeriders is in UK cinemas now.
Canon we fix Star Wars?
NOTE: There are some spoilers ahead for the first four episodes of The Acolyte.
There’s one word ruining the way we discuss big franchise storytelling in 2024, and that word is “canon”. People who care deeply about canon are among the most tedious and unimaginative consumers of entertainment media in the world. That brings us to Star Wars and, specifically, the new Disney+ series The Acolyte.
Leslye Headland’s series has been a bit of a mixed bag thus far, but it has made some people very angry indeed. First, some context. The Acolyte is set in the High Republic era — a century before the prequels — in which the Jedi were abundant and served as peace-keepers for the galaxy. There’s actually an intriguing police corruption narrative bubbling underneath. A mysterious assassin is killing specific Jedi as a result of a secret and shameful event that happened decades ago.
The central conceit of the show is fascinating, using the Star Wars universe as the backdrop for a gradually unfolding mystery. There are issues with its pacing and with when and how it reveals information, but none of that has been the reason so many people hate it. Thanks to a coordinated campaign of review-bombing, its Rotten Tomatoes audience approval score is just 14%.
Some people (morons) have the (tedious) problems you’d expect. It’s too “woke” for a sci-fi show to feature people of colour and women. There’s no way a larger man would be athletic enough to be a Jedi (those people need to watch more pro wrestling). It’s offensive to make a joke about whether a LITERAL ALIEN ANIMAL THING is a he or a they.
But we’re not here to talk about why all of the people who complain about that stuff need to grow up. We’re here to tell a different set of people to grow up — the canon lobby. They’re angry about The Acolyte and, especially, about episode three, in which we flash back to the childhood of Amandla Stenberg’s character Osha. She grew up with her twin sister in a matriarchal witch coven and they were conceived as a “miracle”, without a father.
The canon lobby is furious because, in their mind, this ruins the uniqueness of Anakin Skywalker. He was the “chosen one” precisely because he was conceived by the Force as a virgin birth. Introducing the idea of another virgin birth in Star Wars is a canon-busting atrocity apparently. This week has even brought forth a cottage industry of moaning around Ki-Adi-Mundi’s age4. Where’s the guy with the long head’s birth certificate, am I right? I can’t enjoy the sci-fi show until I’ve seen it.
When it comes to canon, people need to learn to take the Elsa approach and just let it go. Canon is a fluid, malleable thing. It has to be, otherwise there would be no point in ever revisiting a franchise. How is any creative person supposed to work when there are so many guardrails arbitrarily built around the world they’re working in?
When a creative is given the keys to the franchise, it is their right to do whatever they want with it, knowing that they’re following in the footsteps of greatness. With great power comes great responsibility, as a certain uncle once said — or didn’t say, depending on which version of the canon you follow5.
Franchise storytelling is like a large-scale improv game in which the job of new showrunners and filmmakers is not to protect and guard what came before or break it down entirely, but to say “yes, and…”. Chris Chibnall had every right to present the idea of the Timeless Child in Doctor Who. Leslye Headland has every right to introduce another virgin birth into Star Wars. Rian Johnson had every right to introduce the Force-sensitive kid with the broom. JJ Abrams had every right to resurrect Palpatine. This stuff is supposed to be fun!
The only thing that actually matters is whether the story in front of you is good. If it doesn’t quite align with a story told by someone else decades ago, it doesn’t really matter. The fact that we’re still having this debate about a Star Wars show set a century away from any story we’ve been told before is really dispiriting and probably explains why Disney has, until now, kept its timeline fairly small and focused on characters we know.
The Acolyte isn’t perfect. In fact, it’s quite forgettable thus far — though this week’s episode ended with a doozy of a cliffhanger. But it deserves to be critiqued and analysed on its own benefits as a sci-fi mystery tale, rather than how closely it adheres to the ideas of a man who first created this universe 50 years ago.
The Acolyte is streaming weekly on Disney+.
The Nope Exorcist
Russell Crowe, unbelievably, hadn’t starred in a horror movie until last year’s The Pope’s Exorcist. Nobody would call that film high art, but it was a knowing, raucous ghost train ride, held together by Crowe’s gravitas, silly accent, and endless memes of him behind the wheel of a scooter. It’s fair to say that this year’s The Exorcism — a title seemingly designed to be so generic as to confuse audiences — is not on the same level.
It’s an intriguing setup. Crowe plays actor and recovering addict Tony, who takes on the role of a priest in “The Georgetown Project” — almost certainly a remake of The Exorcist. His daughter Lee (Ryan Simpkins) is on set as an assistant, but also so the audience has an entry point for when the material begins to have a dark impact on Tony. Soon, there’s a lot of non-specific spooky shit going on.
Joshua John Miller — son of The Exorcist star Jason Miller — and co-writer M.A. Fortin previously penned the very enjoyable genre pastiche The Final Girls, but there’s none of that sense of devilish fun here. It’s a plodding, generic horror tale flattened into nothing by a drab visual approach that fails to make the most of the unique environment of a film set.
It doesn’t help that the structure of the movie is fundamentally weird, hopping around in a way that leaves it feeling more like a random assemblage of skits than a coherent descent-into-hell narrative. Simpkins deserves immense credit for how they shoulder the most ludicrous moments, while Crowe gives impressive physicality and tries his best to elevate the material.
Ultimately, there are very few scares to be found and even less intrigue in The Exorcism. Thankfully, it won’t be long until Crowe has a crucifix in his hand again when he returns for the sequel to The Pope’s Exorcist. Demons beware when you hear that Lambretta approaching.
The Exorcism is in UK cinemas now.
Still the Besteros of Westeros
The joy of House of the Dragon in its first season was that it recalled the glory days of Game of Thrones. It was a knotty, political fantasy tale that focused more on whispered conversations and silent betrayals than on the boobs and bloodshed that characterised Thrones in the eyes of the tabloids. With the powerhouse performance of Paddy Considine as the decaying King Viserys at its centre, it comprehensively beat The Rings of Power in 2022’s battle of the fantasy epics.
Now, it’s back and, for the most part, it’s every bit as good. The first episode followed the differing perspectives on the forthcoming war between the Greens and Blacks, with some favouring hot-headed revenge while others urged caution and offered sage advice about political and military manoeuvring. It was immediately a joy to sink back into the dark world of the Targaryen dynasty.
Considine is gone, but Emma D’Arcy and Olivia Cooke have more than enough gravitas to shoulder the shadowy complexity that characterises this series. There’s plenty of bloodshed and dragon dogfights to come but, for now, it’s delicious to relish the moral murk of the pieces moving around the chessboard.
House of the Dragon is airing weekly in the UK on Sky Atlantic and NOW.
Trailer of the Week: Smile 2
It would’ve been easy for writer-director Parker Finn to just rehash the formula for his sequel to 2022’s surprise horror hit Smile. But based on the first teaser trailer, Smile 2 is anything but formulaic. The consistently underrated Naomi Scott is in the lead role as a pop star who finds herself pursued by the malevolent, grinning entity from the first film. It’s essentially a supernatural horror movie combined with Vox Lux. I couldn’t be more sold.
Smile 2 is in UK cinemas from 18th October.
Next week: I’m away celebrating my wife’s 30th birthday, but it’s fair to say that I’ll be more than ready to talk about Kinds of Kindness when I’m back. Give me Yorgos, and give him to me now!
There’s a technical explanation too, as provided brilliantly on Twitter by visual effects guy Todd Vaziri. It’s well worth a read.
Seriously, do they do an Oscar for the sexiest performance of the year? Butler would be an absolute shoo-in for that one.
We’re deep in the Great Wookieepedia War of 2024, folks.
It is absolutely hilarious how much effort successive Spider-Man movies have put into making sure that nobody says the line.