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Strictly by accident one night, I taped a movie off a movie channel on TV. I had set the thing to tape a fight, but the fight was a first-round bludgeon, so they tossed this movie on to kill time. I sat back, all ready to watch two grown men beat the snot out of each other, and instead, I was introduced to a movie called Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man. I'd never heard of it, never saw it on a screen anywhere, and, had never seen it in a video store, but here it was. It stars Don Johnson and Mickey Rourke as longtime friends and bikers. Don Johnson's Marlboro Man is a former rodeo rider who thinks he's past his prime, and Rourke's Harley is just what you'd think, a leather-wrapped nomad who lives only to ride his Harley around the country, looking for no place special. They meet back up one night in a bar, and head back to their old stomping grounds. This is set in the sorta-near future, and, the old hometown, Burbank, CA, is now one big international airport. The only non-corporate owned thing in the area is the bar they hung out at, thanks to some unseeing idiot at the bank who gave the owner, Pops, a 30-year lease. But, that lease is up soon, and, if Pops wants to keep the place, he's gotta scratch up a cool $10 million, which of course he ain't got a ghost of a chance at getting. Harley and Marlboro take umbrage at this, and set out to rob an armored car to pay the new lease. They, along with their old crew from the bar, do just that, but they hit the wrong car. No money, but a huge shipment of some new designer drug called Crystal Dream, a 100% addictive drug dropped into the eyes for a hallucination effect. Harley and Marlboro go to the bank to negotiate a drugs-for-money swap. They get their payment and steer barwards to celebrate, but a team of well-armored hitmen shows up and blows everyone away in the bar. Harley and Marlboro escape with the money, and make it to Vegas, only to be met in the hotel lobby by the hitmen. Finally, they realize that they're being tracked, and, until they make things right, these guys are gonna hound them for the rest of their days. So, they go back to Burbank, ready for the final face-off. Bullets fly, and this modern-day Butch and Sundance head off for glory. There's a mile-long laundry list of things wrong with this movie, but it's almost mesmerizing in its simplicity. It runs like a futuristic Easy Rider, a mix of Fonda/Hopper and Newman/Redford, trying for some parable of friendship and the lure of the open road. Johnson is mighty funny as the cynical cowboy, and he has moments of near genius as he plays the cooler head to Rourke's hothead biker Harley. There are also some quick, solid performances by Giancarlo Esposito, Tom Sizemore, Daniel Baldwin, and Chelsea Field, especially good as Marlboro's long-lost girlfriend, Virginia (known as Virginia Slim...think about it...). Rourke gets another chance to wear a mouthful of fake bridgework, and he shows moments of comedic timing that almost make you remember how good an actor he used to be. Call it a guilty pleasure, 'cause I fully accept that this is a movie I should hate, but I don't. The action sequences are dang good, the "buddy" film aspect works well for Johnson and Rourke, and the script is full of inside jokes and "buddy-buddy" humor that powered other films like the Lethal Weapon series. It's easy to see that, if this movie had broken large, there woulda been a series of sequels, following Harley and Marlboro through their high-on-the-hog road adventures. Truth be told, I need to see another one, to see if the first one was a fluke that just grabbed something sideways in me. If you're ever eye-wanderin' the shelves at your local rental parlor, give Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man a look. It ain't gonna run a race against Easy Rider, or Lethal Weapon, or any of the "classics" of buddy movie history, but it is an groovy way to spend a half-night. Believe it or not, it's a good movie. Its biggest drawback, though, is that it suffers most from lack of exposure to the light of day.
Get "reel" soon,
See past Alternative Medicine columns: A Christmas Story | To Kill A Mockingbird | I Wanna Hold Your Hand | Kingpin | Joe Versus the Volcano | The Commitments | Indian Summer | The Big Lebowski | Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man | The Texas Chainsaw Massacre | Empire Records | That Thing You Do! | The Ten Commandments | The Third Man | Waiting for Guffman
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