The Bikeriders

As cool as Austin Butler taking a drag of a cigarette over Jodie Comer’s Chicagoan narration and shots of Tom Hardy, Boyd Holbrook and Michael Shannon cruising across American highways may be, The Bikeriders falls frustratingly short of greatness.

What clearly wants to be the Goodfellas of biker gang stories, and clearly showing real dedication to its source material if the photos over the credits are anything to go by, just doesn’t quite cohere into a truly satisfying story.

It’s a shame as there’s definitely a five star film buried in here somewhere, scrapping to get out.

The tone, setting, beautiful cinematography and powerhouse performances are all present and correct and the first half of the film pulls you right into this world of rebellion and lost souls finding family in each other.

It’s difficult to truly put a finger on what lets it down.

Perhaps it’s the format, which uses the framing of an interview with Comer’s character Kathy, the outlier of the group and wife to Butler’s Benny.

Whilst she’s brilliant in the role, this framing device can all too easily come across as lazy and uninspiring and cutting from hangouts with the biker gang to a chat over the kitchen table is not really what we want to see.

Likewise, it always loses a little of the buzz and threat when you’ve already seen the end of the story.

It also doesn’t quite frame the central relationship properly.

Butler matches Comer in intensity, and can brood and smoulder with the best of them, but their lack of scenes together really hurts the fact that we’re meant to root for them as a couple.

It, also, just doesn’t quite have that outlaw spirit you’d expect.

A few punches are thrown in anger and a bar gets burned down in retaliation but the one cop chase scene we see ends when the bike runs out of gas, which is almost too apt a metaphor for the film as a whole.

Not even an expectantly excellent Tom Hardy performance, amongst an absolutely stacked cast delivering a pretty solid script, can take away from the fact that, with a few tweaks, more could have been done to bottle that biker spirit that The Bikeriders just doesn’t seem to have.

An enjoyable ride nonetheless, but not quite a classic.

⭐️⭐️⭐️