Executive producer Quentin Tarantino sends another appreciative nod to a classic movie genre through the eyes of triple threat Larry Bishop, who writes, directs and stars in Hell Ride as “Pistolero,” the leader of the biker gang known as the Victors. Along with his right and left hand men – the quiet but deadly Gent (Michael Madsen) and the esoteric Comanche (Eric Balfour) – Pistolero is gunning for Deuce (David Carradine) and Billy Wings (Vinnie Jones), who lead a rival crew called the 666ers, to avenge the murder of one of their own. With Comanche’s mysterious past and a growing mutiny within the Victors, Pistolero has to sort friend from foe if he plans on surviving.
Pistolero was a hard character for me to get used to. Larry Bishop looked like Dustin Hoffman with a pornstache to me, and I have a hard time believing Dustin Hoffman would ever be credible on a steel horse, let alone able to muster up enough machismo to fill Pistolero’s shoes. Hell Ride had the testosterone cranked all the way up, from the in-fighting to the callous womanizing, including a boatload of female nudity which not only fits the genre, but has been agonizingly lacking in today’s films. While it was a fun ride to watch, the amount of nonchalance prevalent in all the characters was eventually what did the movie in for me. The climax was so anticlimactic because of it. For a movie like this, I expected a big shoot out, maybe even a high adrenaline motorcycle chase ending in a grand explosion; I don’t know, something…exciting! Instead, you could fall asleep when the rivals collide, gunshots aside. Hell Ride could have done better than settle for such a lackadaisical ending.
