Every day Robert Saucedo shines a spotlight on a movie either so bad it’s good or just downright terrible. Today: When it comes to motocross movies, Corbin Bleu it!
I feel so naïve.
I’ve gone my entire life and it’s just now that I learn that motocross is a sport and not just a hobby for rich kids. Thanks Free Style for opening my eyes.
Free Style, Fox’s family-friendly motocross movie, is just full of lessons. For example, I also learned that Corbin Bleu is an actor and not, as I previously assumed, the name of a dish consisting of two slices of Wiener Schnitzel filled with cheese and a slice of ham.
In the 2008 film, which just recently got a DVD release, Bleu stars as Cale Bryant, a motocross racer with dreams of being on the pro circuit. If he is going to make it to the big time, though, he’s going to have to get over his incessant need to constantly be a whiny little spaz.
Bryant mopes his way through the movie — continuously complaining about one misfortune after the other. Whether it’s having to work two jobs in order to support his family, the fact that his father left when he was only a child or that his girlfriend would rather study for her college classes then have to hang around Bryant and his motocross friends as they bitch about how hard it is to be a professional motocross racer, Bryant is on perpetual whine mode.
Unfortunately, none of Bryant’s woes are terribly troubling — with a little pluck and elbow grease he could easily overcome any of the obstacles script writers Jeffrey Nicholson and Joshua Leibner dreamt up.
Free Style is a motocross melodrama that is light on the drama and heavy on the melo — as in short for marshmallow. The film is pure fluff — with its sights squarely set on the tween market that ravenously eats this crap up.
When a Nickelback song begins to play during a montage that sees Bryant travel to different parts of his town and stare pensively into the horizon, all hope is officially lost.
Speaking of montages, Free Style apparently stocked up on the plot devices in case of a nuclear holocaust. I hadn’t seen that many montages in a movie since Montage: The Motion Picture.
Penelope Ann Miller escapes from obscurity long enough to phone in a performance as Cale’s mother — a single mom working hard to support her two children. Miller, an actress that has shown herself capable of truly great performances, is little more then window dressing — a spot of credibility in a film that is essentially a Corbin Bleu vanity project.
Unfortunately, Bleu fails to show he is worthy of headlining a film — even one with such a bland and uninspired script.
Besides zipping around a dirt track while “playing” motocross — a sport the movie repeatedly informs audiences is the most demanding sport ever — Bleu does little more then deliver his dialogue in a state of near- somnambulism.
He bickers with his girlfriend, woos a new Latina lass and trades harsh words with a motocross rival — but Bleu never truly manages to convince the audience he has any real emotional investment in his character’s actions.
In the end, Free Style is not an offensively bad movie. If somebody was to tell me that they enjoyed it, I would not think ill of them. I wouldn’t invite them to recommend movies to watch or let them anywhere near my pet but I wouldn’t mock them either — at least not to their face.
If you are a fan of motocross or flavorless pretty boy actors with high traces of peach-fuzz on their chin, you’ll probably be able to tolerate Free Style.
Everybody else would be better off doing something more productive with their time — like training to enter the motocross pro circuit. I hear motocross is the most grueling sport known to man.
Robert Saucedo loves how much extra free time he has due to the fact that he doesn’t give two cents about sports. Follow him on Twitter @robsaucedo2500.
