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In a word: pointless.

Here’s something that hasn’t happened in a long time: I didn’t care about anyone in this movie. Not a single character. And if you don’t care about the people, it’s damn hard to care about what they’re up to.

Nor was I entertained. Not every movie is going to be entertaining, or even interesting, but think about Hell Ride’s list of credentials: Biker movie. Graphic violence. Gratuitous nudity and sex. Tough-guy dialogue. Double-crosses. Dennis Hopper riding a motorcycle again. David Carradine doing his thing. A Quentin Tarantino/Robert Rodriguez association, even if it’s one of those “Presents” situations, and Rodriguez is only doing bits of the score.

On paper, this is the formula for a movie that could be fantastic, amusing, or at least a breezy way to kill 90 minutes. In execution, Hell Ride is brain poison: it is not only bad but actively hostile. If Michael Haneke’s remake of Funny Games was an “experiment” to test the audience’s tolerance for deplorable behavior, Hell Ride is the proof for that experiment.

Briefly: Pistolero (Larry Bishop) runs a biker gang called the Victors, and the Victors are getting chopped down by their rival gang, the Six-Six-Sixes. The Six-Six-Sixes, run by Billy Wing (Vinnie Jones, the only actor here who appears to be having any fun) and some other guy (David Carradine), are a decidedly nastier bunch than the Victors… maybe… and their tactics seem to be working. The Victors are soon shot down to just three guys: Pistolero, The Gent (Michael Madsen), and Comanche (Eric Balfour). The Victors want revenge on the Sixes for killing a woman back in 1976, a woman killed for stealing from the Sixes, and this and that and the other. Everyone wants to kill each other.

There’s also an oracle (Leonor Varela) who advises and sleeps with Pistolero in equal measure. Their dialogue is entirely pun-based and doesn’t know when to stop. It’s easy to tell that Bishop—who wrote and also directed Hell Ride—thought this was all very clever or at least fun, but I couldn’t shake the mental image of a guy searching for clichés that all included the same word and then slugging in character names in front of them. Voila! Dialogue.

I found myself wanting to set the screen on fire.

Hell Ride obeys (more or less) the style of the biker movies of the 70’s it’s—homaging? Ripping off?—and that’s well and good. Everyone’s a little scummy and the violence and nudity are way over the top, which is also well and good. None of that bothers me. But I am not OK with terminal boredom, much of which derives from Bishop’s over-direction. Here’s a quiz: If you want to show a procession of your badass bikers riding down the highway, how do you frame them? Do you use a lot of random zooms, blurs, focuses, lens flares, color saturations, and jittery edits? Do you, in short, do everything possible not to simply show your procession of badass bikers? Watching many of these “stylish” transition scenes, I was reminded of someone who’s just discovered the filters in Photoshop: they want to use every tool in the box with no sense of why those tools should be used, or when.

There will no doubt be a vocal set of fans who declare Hell Ride to be the greatest movie since the last greatest movie. It’s an homage to a dead genre, and for some that will always be a mark of specialness, to be jealously defended until the next movie in need of “defense” comes along. To them, I can only respond with my buddy Joe’s critique of the movie: There’s a reason they stopped making movies like this. Hell Ride is a relic; worse, it is a pastiche of a relic, whose only reason for existing is an exercise in swagger and “style.” I have better things to do with my time.

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