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When Dods and I were in the Family Dollar store the other day, buying a mop and some cleaning solvent, I noticed a DVD rack and perused it while Dods paid at the register. Most of the DVDs – all for a dollar, obviously – were Westerns starring people I’d never heard of. But then I found BMX Bandits. Starring Nicole Kidman. In her first film role. At age sixteen.
Needless to say we bought it.
There are two reasons BMX Bandits had to be mine (or fine, ours).
1. When I was little, like four or five, I went through a big-time BMX phase. It was mostly because I kept renting The Dirt Bike Kid and Rad over and over. One of the lines from Rad – and this is a movie I haven’t seen for over a decade and a half, yet I still remember specific sequences – was, “If I make the finals, will you be there?” This is delivered by the main character, a BMX racer, to his special friend, who is a girl. They’re standing in a shallow river if I recall correctly, and I’m not sure exactly how she responds, but I’m pretty sure she is, in fact, there when he makes the finals.
So one day my mom was standing in our kitchen and I walked up to her and said, “Mom. If I make the finals, will you be there?” and she was like, “What the hell are you talking about?” because there were no finals, but even if there were, my mom would be contractually obligated to be there because she was my mom and I was her five-year-old son. It was the same reason she was at all my hockey practices.
But I wanted there to be a finals so badly that I actually held a race on a dirt road that ran through a meadow near my house. A bunch of local kids showed up with their parents, and my mom and I had gone to a store in town that sold neat-looking rocks, and we were going to hand those out as trophies.
This was my moment to shine, to show off the skills I had gleaned from hours of watching The Dirt Bike Kid and Rad. And I dominated the race. I was ahead going into the final straightaway and then about ten feet from the finish line I hit a stick and went flying over the handlebars and knocked myself out.
I was kind of over BMX after that.
2. I’m pretty obsessed with Nicole Kidman. Of course I knew of BMX Bandits from her iMDb profile, but I never thought I’d actually own her virginal film unless I ordered it from Australia for forty dollars, and then another 400 for shipping and handling.
This was an opportunity not to be missed. It was like getting a Babe Ruth rookie card for a dollar, but it was better than a baseball card because it was a movie, and you can watch a movie, whereas with a baseball card, what can you really do with it? Look at it? Put it in your BMX bike spokes?
Since you probably won’t be able to find BMX Bandits in a Family Dollar store near you, and because I don’t want you to have to pay 440 dollars for the movie, and because I want you to feel jealous that I own it, here is a brief plot summary:
The film opens with generic 80’s motivational music and alternate close-ups of two BMX racers (or bandits?) putting on all their protective gear. One is in red, one is in blue. The two bandits look at each other, then take off down a staircase, along a beachside road, the red one does a wheelie, the blue one rides backward, they do wheelie 180s into more wheelies, and then the blue one stands on his handlebars with no hands. See, it’s scenes like this that made me fall in love with BMX.
Now would be the appropriate time to add synthesizers to the 80’s motivational music, and that’s exactly what whoever is composing the music does.
The bandits take off their helmets and the guy in the red (who wears matching red elbow pads with rainbow straps) says, “This is thirsty work. Why don’t we go to (incomprehensible) and get a milkshake?”
The blue one says, “Sure! Last one there pays.
And they race off, but to where I’m not sure because they both speak Australian and most words can only be deciphered through context.
Oh no. Bad guy music. You can tell it’s bad guy music because it consists entirely of one minor key synthesizer note. We see some dudes in an unmarked white van, passing out shotguns. These, we deduce, must be the bad guys. They all put on plastic pig masks, except for one, who wears a wolf mask. Two of the pigs talk in a secret pig language to each other – one oinks, the other makes ree ree noises. They laugh.
Then they drive their van through the front window of a bank. Cashiers and customers are held at gunpoint and one of the bad guys says, “You’re looking death in the face” because apparently the Grim Reaper, if you pull back his hood, is wearing a plastic pig mask.
You wouldn’t guess it at first, but Top Gun is actually a rip off of BMX Bandits. My evidence for this is:
1. BMX Bandits was made in 1983. Top Gun was made in 1986.
2. One of the main characters in BMX Bandits (he’s the blue bandit) is named Goose.
3. Goose and P.J. (the red bandit, played by Angelo D’Angelo, who undoubtedly has gone on to star in thousands of Australian porn movies) have the exact same relationship that Maverick and Goose have in Top Gun. P.J. is the good-looking, fearless, semi-reckless leader. Goose is the skinny, witty, nervous wingman who is the type of kid that wouldn’t take his shirt off during a game of extremely homoerotic volleyball.
Witness this dialogue between P.J. and Goose:
P.J.: Listen, Goose, you know what we’ve got to get?
Goose: Yeah, Lost.
P.J.: Not if we got our own BMX track. Well, you know, somewhere all the kids could around here could ride with no hassles.
Goose: Great idea. Will we get it before or after we have our bikes gold-plated?
P.J.: Other areas get them, why can’t we?
Goose: Listen, P.J., next thing you’ll be telling me you believe in the Easter Bunny.
P.J.: Doesn’t everyone?
Goose: Race you to the mall.
P.J.: See you there.
Tell me Jerry Bruckheimer didn’t take that dialogue and give it straight to Tom Cruise and Anthony Edwards. Read it again, but this time instead of “bikes,” substitute “F-16s;” instead of “the Easter Bunny,” substitute “a MiG 28 doing a 4g negative dive;” instead of “mall,” substitute “showers;” and instead of “See you there,” substitute “I’ll soap you up.”
At the mall, we finally get our first glimpse of Nicole. She’s tall, skinny, and after we get a close-up, oh my God, definitely not hot. You can see she has potential, but she’s just a young colt, not a thoroughbred yet. She’s like a young college lacrosse attackman who has great athleticism but no left hand and very little understanding of the offense. Basically, she needs better makeup, an eyebrow wax, and her hair is just a disaster. She looks like my dad’s golden doodle Cosmo before he got his hair cut and abandoned the Rod Stewart look.
Young Nicole works at a department store where she tries to organize grocery carts, but can’t because a fat kid keeps antagonizing her and pushing the carts apart. He’s on a BMX bike because in Australia that’s just how you get around.
The fat kid pushes some carts across the parking lot and the BMX Bandits (remember: they were racing to the mall) crash into the carts. It looks like they should have broken two collarbones, three femurs, and a skull, but they’re fine. Nicole, however, inexplicably gets fired. And more importantly, the bikes are in rough shape.
So the three new friends – Nicole (a.k.a. Judy), P.J., and Goose – are in dire straits. They have no money, broken bikes, and no jobs, leading to this memorable exchange:
P.J.: If we put our heads together, we could come up with something.
Goose: Yeah, multiple dandruff.
There’s nary a line of dialogue in BMX Bandits that doesn’t classify as a killer one-liner.
Now we’re in the bad guy’s warehouse and the head bad guy announces the earnings from the bank robbery: 101,586 dollars. Doesn’t sound very impressive. Unless Aussie dollars are different than American dollars.
Oh, okay, but the next job is going to be worth a quarter of a million dollars. Making the hit is going to be the easy part, the head guy says. But getting away is going to be tough. “The payroll truck is radio controlled,” (a line of dialogue that doesn’t make sense to me either, and probably is only there to make the head guy sound like he has some sort of technical expertise).
To circumvent the obvious problems created by a radio-controlled payroll truck, the bad guys have acquired “this little beauty” all the way from the U.S.A. By “this little beauty,” they mean, “walkie-talkie.” An important thing to note about these walkie-talkies is that they have eight-foot long antennae that put my blue sparkle 1994 Kyocera cell phone to shame.
Remember the antennae – they’ll come into play later.
“[The walkie-talkie] puts us one step ahead of the police,” the head guy says. So basically in Australia if you have any piece of equipment that comes from America, the cops are totally defenseless.
Nicole meets the boys at a dock (they’ve borrowed Goose’s dad’s rubber dingy) and this seems like a good time to point out that for a sixteen-year-old, Nicole has a tremendous body. Or maybe it’s because she’s sixteen. Either way, she dons an inflatable yellow life jacket and the three of them are off to make enough money to get those bikes fixed.
Apparently their plan is to…
Peel mussels off of pilings and then sell them. Ingenious.
After one piling proves to be non-lucrative, they move on to a dock where they find, at the end of a rope, an orange case. They take the case.
As they motor away from the dock, they pass the bad guys and wave. This will turn out to be a thoroughly ironic gesture.
The two bad guys, who are more incompetent than Dr. Evil’s villains, look like Billy Idol and Charlie Sheen if Charlie Sheen were to go on a three-month OxyContin binge during which he decided it would be a good idea to grow a moustache. Billy and Charlie drive a cigarette boat that’s red and black and has a demon painted on the bow. I’m no bad guy, but if I were engaged in illicit activities, like picking up hijacked walkie-talkies, I don’t think I’d do it in a cigarette boat that had a demon painted on it. Just seems like that would attract unwanted attention.
Of course the bad guys see that the case is gone and they realize it most have been those kids in the rubber dingy who took it, so they chase after them and eventually track them to an old boat house. The kids have vacated, however, and the case is… empty. Billy Idol, clearly upset, moans, “Ahhhhhhhh, poo!”
And this pretty much sets up the rest of the movie’s plot. The bad guys try to catch the kids, who sell the walkie-talkies in order to pay for new BMX gear. Even Nicole gets a new outfit – with pink shirt, yellow pants, and a yellow helmet that says Judy.
To celebrate, the kids go to a half-pipe and Judy shows off her BMX moves, except that now Judy is clearly a guy with a mullet or a very convincing wig. P.J. and Goose don’t care though – they have never been so turned on. An 80’s rock anthem plays in the background as Nicole/her male stunt double shows her stuff – the chorus: “I See Boys. I See Boooooooyyyyyss.”
Nicole rides up to P.J. and there’s some serious chemistry going on, and Goose asks if it’s a private party, and Nicole says, “You know what they say: Two’s company, three gets us talked about.” And this, my friends, is the movie’s shining moment – when a sixteen-year-old Nicole Kidman slyly suggests an Eiffel Tower.
The conflict between bad guys and BMX bandits leads to a remarkably well-portrayed scene in the local graveyard, in which Billy and Charlie take their ineptitude to previously unfathomable levels. They both wear ghoul masks, but the masks don’t protect them from getting slapped to the ground (by Nicole) or poked in the eye with an extended walkie-talkie antenna (by P.J. – and see, I told you the antenna would come into play.) They also manage to trip over each other while running on completely flat ground. They’re just running along, minding their own business, and suddenly, BAM, they’re in the mud. If there were a store that sold bad guys, and Charlie and Billy were two of its products, that store would for sure be out of business.
The graveyard also gives us an awkward moment between Goose and Nicole when Goose goes in for the kiss, gets rejected, and says, “It’s P.J., isn’t it? He looks like Mr. Universe.”
Top Gun, Top Gun, TOP GUN
The kids escape from the graveyard, but later they split up, and Nicole ends up alone in the boathouse. Billy and Charlie, dressed as undercover police offices (whatever that means), come to interrogate her. When Billy becomes frustrated with Nicole’s refusal to answer questions about the whereabouts of the walkie-talkies, he insinuates that Charlie will rape her at knife point. Isn’t this supposed to be a kids’ movie? How do Australians think it’s okay to slip a rape threat into a PG movie?
Imagine if in Spy Kids one of the children was captured by evil-doers and tortured like George Clooney in Syriana when he gets his fingernails ripped off one by one. Children in the audience would be crying, moms would be screaming, babies would be pooping themselves… I was never a big fan of movie ratings when I wasn’t allowed to watch R-rated films (now my parents let me – count it!), but I do believe they should be used as a rough guideline. Although, if there were a porn version of BMX Bandits called BMXXX Bandits I would pay at least 440 dollars for it. Maybe even more if we’re talking Australian dollars.
The film culminates in a chase scene that brings together the best of Ronin, The Blues Brothers, and The Tour de France. Then there’s a fight between the bad guys and hundreds of BMX Bandits, in which the little banditos use sacks of flower for weaponry and somehow defeat the bank robbers who have metal pipes and guns. The fight scene is a lot like one of the battles from Braveheart, except if all the Scots were wearing hypercolor t-shirts and helmets that said P.J., Goose, or Judy.
Then there’s one more chase scene, which ends in a foam party, before the kids are shown celebrating their victory over the bad guys at… a new BMX track! Perhaps it’s predictable, but it’s also uplifting, like a grande Starbucks cappuccino.
Actually, to be honest, this movie really sucked.
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