How many times have you sat down with the family to watch the latest big-budget Hollywood blockbuster on a Saturday night, desperate for your fix of choreographed violence, laughably unlikely plotlines, frustratingly child-friendly sex scenes and grossly exaggerated pyrotechnic displays? We’ve got a lot to thank the likes of Scorsese, Tarantino and Spielberg for. You can be rest assured that whenever one of these top Tinseltown movie directors appears on the Jonathan Ross show spouting about their latest flick, it’s surely the kind of thing that’ll have audiences on the very edges of their cinema seats. Or their sofas, if they can be arsed to wait for it to come out on VHS. Or Blue-ray DVD. Or Netflix. Or something.
The fighting, the shagging and the needless explosions are all part of the cinematic experience, and although they seldom have anything to do with the actual storyline, we, the audience, love a bit of it. It’s all a bit over the top, but that’s fine, that’s what you sign up to when you pay through the nose for a cinema ticket. But there has to be a line drawn at some point.
Now where you draw that line is up to you, but I’ll tell you where I draw mine. I draw the line at the humble car and bike chase. I don’t mind the idea of it; the baddy is in a car, so the goody steals a bike to make his escape – that’s fine. But it’s never as simple as that.
First of all, the protagonist, riding one handed, always manages to find a few hundred rounds in his 32-round clip as he sprays 9mm slugs out the end of his Uzi. All of his shots seem to find a target, as returning fire from countless AK-47s miraculously misses him.
And that’s not all the Hollywood mathematicians have got to answer for; I don’t know of one motorcycle with a 50-speed gearbox, yet all the bikes in the movies seem to have them. Every shaky camera-pan seems to have half a dozen upshifts and you rarely see a downshift. What are these bikes?
What are these bikes indeed? That’s a much more difficult question than you might expect it to be. That bike that you would swear is a BMW S 1000 RR, actually sounds more like a Honda CR 250 two-stroke motocross bike. And that bike that looks just like a Ducati 916, sounds more like a Formula 1 car. I don’t know who’s fitting such weird and wonderful engines and gearboxes to these bikes, but they needn’t bother.
You have to ask yourself, why on earth would the dubbing mixers waste studio time recording the wrong sound to dub over their car and bike chases? What’s wrong with the sound the actual bike makes? You’ve got it there, right in front of you, why don’t you just use it, ya dick? Or are you doing it just to annoy me?
I’ve entitled this rant ‘Why are bike chases in films so ridiculous?’ but unfortunately, if you came here looking for a sensible and genuine answer, you’re going to be left wanting. All I can offer is some conjecture. Some speculation, if you will.
I think the people that are responsible for the aforementioned film faux pas genuinely don’t know their arses from their elbows when it comes to motorcycles. And I think they need to get it sorted. It’s one thing having a plot that’s as far fetched as piss from China, but when you are changing the noise a bike makes just for the sake of it, you need to have a word with yourself.
Sort it out Hollywood, before you loose yet another fan.
Boothy