such high hopes....so sad after....
First let me say I've been watching Supercross since about the mid 1980s when Rick Johnson and David Bailey were banging bars.
As a fan and former pit crew member of an MX race team I was excited to hear about this movie. Especially so when I saw real MXers were consulted and used. It was only a matter of having not had a chance to see it until recently. They pumped it up at the races for two years, a lot of industry people involved, I figured it would be good no matter what....
Of course the story is thin, the actors were weak, and the realism often questionable. But I would have been willing to suspend those things just to enjoy the movie about a sport I love.
I was even willing to grant them the leeway of putting a relative unknown into a Factory ride with Nami racing. In this case all they needed to do was claim that KC could have raced in Europe or something, or make the entire case younger and claim that he jumped into the fold from amateur racing. After all Yamaha's Josh Hill has stepped into the mix on a 450cc SX machine and won races this season as an 18 year old rookie.
But far and away the most moronic thing was the fictional Nami Racing being upset that KC won. I happen to know for a fact that as much as a factory wants a champion, they are not going to begrudge a new guy winning. If anything, this in fact makes the bike look even better that an unknown rider could go out and spank the other factories on it.....you cannot buy that kind of publicity and proving....
The entire notion of "blocking" as it is portrayed is nonsense. Team Yamaha is not going to tell Josh Hill to pull over so Chad Reed can go by, and they are not going to tell Hill to take out Kevin Windham so Reed is not "bothered" by him. If your top guy cannot win without someone blocking, he is not going to win at all. I'm not sure where the inspiration was for this other than to create controversy and give KC an excuse to quit the factory ride........
Certainly they could have come up with a better idea to give KC a reason to quit Nami. A fight with Rowdy to create tension between the two would have been better. As it was the Rowdy role was weak at best and undeveloped.
They also managed to somehow fail to capture power and grace of SX/MX racing. This seems almost impossible considering Speed Channel manages to catch it every week at the track with no script. And thousands of MX/SX videos have captured since the dawn of racing. The sound effects were odd at times, and did not help convey anything other then racket, when they could have been used to enhance.
I am willing to suspend belief for movies more often than not. But with this one I had a hard time understanding why those choices were made. Especially considering they are major plot points that drive the entire story...... in this case they drive the story right into the face of a huge triple and leave you wanting a rewrite....