Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man

The Robbins Recipe: take one or two lines from every action picture ever made, stir. Add an extra pinch of Roadhouse and Hudson Hawk. I pay it the highest compliment a bad movie can get - it is almost as much fun as Roadhouse.

I think Road House is probably the most comparable movie, because they both have unbelievable over-the-top villainy, the violent death of the best friends of the protagonists, absurd macho posturing, hilariously (intentionally??) bad dialogue, cartoon violence, and professional wrestlers in the cast. I guess Terry Funk was too old for this one, but they got Big John Studd to fill in nicely.

In fact, the wrestling theme is appropriate, because if you read what I wrote in the previous paragraph, you'll see that both of these movies could, in fact, be running plot threads for the WWF. If you told me Vince McMahon wrote them both, I wouldn't be surprised for a minute. A biker and a cowboy could easily be a WWF tag team.

Where to begin? Biker Mickey Rourke (Harley Davidson) and sharpshootin' rodeo cowpoke Don Johnson (the Marlboro Man) have a good friend, an elderly father figure, who is about to lose his road house (trapped among skyscrapers in the middle of a future Burbank) so that the suits can tear it down and build another skyscraper. His lease expires in two weeks, and the bank wants $2.5 million cash for a new five-year lease.

So our heroes have only one choice, of course, they have to rob that very bank to pay off the lease. The rob the armored car, but are immediately confronted by two surprises:

1) The armored car's back-up is five guys in bulletproof Kevlar overcoats (including a lesser Baldwin). Since they arrive in their limo within about a minute of the heist, one assumes that they drive around LA all day long in these long overcoats, carrying their automatic weapons. 2) Our heroes give these bulletproof guys the slip by sneaking down a manhole into a truck they had hidden in the drainage canals, only to find that instead of money they managed to hijack a zillion dollars worth of a new, dangerous, highly addictive drug.
	NUDITY REPORT
	There is a naked woman (Mitzi Martin) in the opening scene with Rourke. We see all of her except her pubic area. Chelsea Field is naked (tastefully turned away from the camera) in a love scene with Johnson Bobbie Tyler is a stripper who removes her top in close-up, then dances in the background of a scene.

So now they have to work a deal where they trade the drugs for some cash. The bulletproof guys do the swap uneventfully, but they show up at the Road House a few minutes later (turns out they planted a homing device in the money), and they kill everyone in there except Rourke and Johnson. This means that they slaughtered four of our boys' best friends, including the old geezer who owned the Roadhouse.

Now the boys are pissed, so they escape from the bulletproof guys by jumping 15 stories into a hotel pool in Vegas, while the bulletproof guys rain down machine gun fire from the roof into the pool. Did I mention that they got to Vegas in the luggage compartment of a jet? Macho guys don't worry about any of that sissy cabin pressure stuff. Then they fight back against Bulletproof Baldwin and kick his ass in an airplane graveyard, thus earning them the right to take on Mr Big - the multilingual banker who runs drugs for a living. Well, Bigster is just about to have them killed by his spare bulletproof guys when a helicopter shows up outside Big's office window and blasts away with the forward cannons, destroying all the windows and everything in the office, and killing the last of the bulletproof dudes. I didn't make that up. They did have $2.5 million dollars, so they hired a helicopter to blast away. And, as movie luck would have it, the helicopter pilot had no qualms about flying up to the window of a bank CEO and slaughtering everyone in his office.

Then our boys push Big out his open window, and ride off to be in a rodeo. There are no investigations of any kind. They are free to go about their business.

The one thing that keeps this movie from being as good as Roadhouse is that Roadhouse took itself seriously, and is filled with gravitas and somber declarations. I'm pretty sure they had no idea how bad it was. These Harley/Marlboro guys knew the movie was silly, and they hammed it up. Harley even makes cavalier jokes when their friends are slaughtered (something Patrick Swayze would never have done), although Marlboro does punch him out for doing it.

Tuna's comments:

A few points Scoop missed:

Harley leaves Texas on his bike, goes through Las Vegas, then goes over the Altamont Pass, and comes down into Burbank, California. Unfortunately, the Altamont is between Oakland and Sacramento, 400 miles north of Burbank.
Much of the action takes place in the Air Force boneyard at Davis Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson. Our boys get there by hopping a fence from the Burbank airport.
They jump 40 stories into the hotel pool, kicking their legs the entire way. If they had actually hit the water spread-legged as pictured, the actual fall would have given them massive chlorinated enemas and very sore testicles.
Although Johnson is the world's greatest shot, he isn't the world's greatest thinker. He can't figure out why he can't kill the bulletproof guys until the third shoot-out, when he finally realizes that their heads are unprotected.

sample dialogue:

Rourke to Johnson "If there is a heaven and a God, hey, I'd like to meet the dude and hang out with him"

The end of the movie: Rourke with hitchhiker "Where ya goin'" "No place special" "Hop on, I'll take you there".

DVD info from Amazon.

Widescreen anamorphic, 1.85:1
no significant features

The Critics Vote

no major reviewers

The People Vote ...

With their votes ... IMDB summary: IMDb voters score it 4.7. Oh, yeah, it is that bad, but that's such a humorless way to look at life.
With their dollars ... domestic gross: $7 million

IMDb guideline: 7.5 usually indicates a level of excellence, about like three and a half stars from the critics. 6.0 usually indicates lukewarm watchability, about like two and a half stars from the critics. The fives are generally not worthwhile unless they are really your kind of material, about like two stars from the critics. Films under five are generally awful even if you like that kind of film, equivalent to about one and a half stars from the critics or less, depending on just how far below five the rating is.

My own guideline: A means the movie is so good it will appeal to you even if you hate the genre. B means the movie is not good enough to win you over if you hate the genre, but is good enough to do so if you have an open mind about this type of film. C means it will only appeal to genre addicts, and has no crossover appeal. D means you'll hate it even if you like the genre. E means that you'll hate it even if you love the genre. F means that the film is not only unappealing across-the-board, but technically inept as well.

Based on this description, this film is unrateable. It is a movie so bad that it is good. It can best be compared to Roadhouse - a movie so completely awful in every way that it provides non-stop entertainment and is a sheer delight to watch.