'Biker Boyz' revs up the machismo

Friday, January 31, 2003

By SEAN AXMAKER
SPECIAL TO THE POST-INTELLIGENCER

Smoke (Laurence Fishburne) is the reigning "King of Cali" as the leader of a prime-time biker gang, the Black Knights. Bulked up with a barrel of a body, he's an adult running from the realities of age, chasing his lost youth in the urban fantasy of motorcycle jockeys as modern-day knights. He even has a herald (Orlando Jones) to sing (or perhaps more accurately rap) his praises when he makes his royal entrance.

MOVIE REVIEW

BIKER BOYZ

DIRECTOR: Reggie Rock Bythewood

CAST: Laurence Fishburne, Derek Luke, Orlando Jones, Djimon Hounsou, Lisa Bonet, Kid Rock

RUNNING TIME: 111 minutes

RATING: PG-13 for violence, sexual content and language

WHERE: Bella Bottega 11, Cinema 17, Crossroads 8, Everett 9, Factoria, Grand Cinemas, Issaquah 9, Longston Place 14, Marysville Cinema 14, Meridian 16, Mountlake 9, Oak Tree, Parkway Plaza 12, Woodinville 12

GRADE: B-

The story of the semi-outlaw Southern California culture of motorcycle groups who escape their civilian lives and day jobs by dressing in club colors to party and race their nights and weekends away would make a fascinating film. Too bad this isn't it.

"Biker Boyz" belongs to young upstart Kid (Derek Luke from "Antwone Fisher"), the angry, ambitious son left fatherless in a freak club fatality. Kid emerges from mourning full of piss and motor oil, leading a secret life as a cycle-riding hustler determined to unseat the King of Cali.

Writer/director Reggie Rock Bythewood cuts this film from similar cloth as "The Fast and the Furious," with the added melodrama of the young cub challenging the wolf-pack leader for supremacy.

Too often the romantic fantasy of chivalry, blacktop honor and rituals of manhood comes off as fatuous. Bythewood neither fully embraces the mythic excess of the material nor satisfactorily subdues it under a realistic framework of modern life.

Yet for all the testosterone-driven soap opera, this entertainingly confused coming-of-age story is a seductive fantasy, a rare portrait of urban underworld machismo without the violence and the viciousness.

The impressive young Luke takes hold of his scenes with simmering intensity and Fishburne's pot-holed face reveals more years of rough road riding than a biker king would care to admit.

Bythewood doesn't have the feel for speed and spectacle, but he does capture the inevitable ossification of age as the King of Cali takes stock of his future in a world invaded by the young and the fearless.