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The Bikeriders Movie Review

The Bikeriders is a 2024 period crime drama film directed by Jeff Nichols and starring Austin Butler and Jodie Comer. It’s a very bad movie.

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“Burn it down“

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Over the course of a decade, a Midwestern motorcycle club evolves from a gathering place for local outsiders to a sinister gang, threatening the original group’s way of life. The fifties just might be the most often revisited and romanticized era in American cinema after the eighties. This movie continues that nostalgia trend for a bygone era, but it doesn’t feel charming, but rather frustratingly thin and plotless.

I don’t personally get the appeal of the biking culture from this era. Why would anybody make a movie out of nasty biker criminals who go around being loud, obnoxious and vile? Of all the groups that you can depict in a film, this might be the most uninteresting and pointless one. And yes, they did get the era right – the costumes and hairstyles are fantastic, the soundtrack is quite good and the overall production design is evocative of this decade.

But there is only so far that these technicalities can take you if you don’t have an interesting plot or characters that the audience will care about. The Bikeriders has neither. The plot mixes the period drama and crime genres, but none of the two worked. The crime elements were obnoxious and the drama was non-existent. The friendship angle was okay, but otherwise this film is pretty much plotless.

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I didn’t care for any of the characters here. Jodie Comer fared best as Kathy, the only female member of the gang. She was very believable and charismatic in the role. She stole the film for me. As for the others, they were all forgettable. Tom Hardy was ridiculous with his silly accent while Michael Shannon was wasted on a mediocre role. As for Austin Butler, he was once again typecast as a fifties figure to cash in on the ‘Elvis’ craze. He looked true to the period, but apart from that he wasn’t all that interesting to me and I still don’t see the appeal to this actor.