BMX Bandits (1984)

This movie was every bit as cheesy as I had expected it to be.80s movie? - Check. A young Nicole Kidman? - Check. BMX bikes? - Check. 80s synth electronica? - Check.The story in "BMX Bandits" is very simplistic and thus requires very little from the audience in order to keep up to speed. The storyline is also quite stereotypical for a movie such as this. A group of youngsters find something hidden by criminals, and as the bad guys try to get their stuff back they are bested by the underdog youngsters. And this time they do it on BMX bikes!The acting was as to be expected for a movie and script such as this. But it was funny to watch a very young Nicole Kidman in a movie such as this, of course.Everything here just reeked to high heaven of the 1980s, and with good reason.This movie would indeed have been enjoyable back in the 1980s when BMX bikes were hot and in, but not so much today.

This is the movie Mad Max: Fury Road could've been. Well, I mean, you know, it's pretty good, anyway. Better than its IMDb average score would suggest, I'd say. Who cares if it's not actually gritty and convincing? It's a kids movie! It's a fun ol' adventure! Plus, the sixteen year-old Nicole Kidman (in her Big Screen Debut, no less) is terrific. Why not watch it? Huh? Why not? Yeah, see? You can't answer me, can you? I thought as much.

'If we'd grown up in Australia, BMX Bandits would have been our version of The Goonies' quote, fame director Quentin Tarantino. While, I don't agree with that statement by Tarantino. I have to somewhat agree with him in one thing. It was indeed, a fun nostalgia trip! Made before the X-Games was a thing and way after 1972's motorcycle documentary, "On Any Sunday'. "BMX Bandit' was a movie that really try to capitalize on the Australians' BMX craze which took off in the early 1980s. Made in the middle of the whole Ozploitation New Wave movement (late 1970s to late 1980s). 'BMX Bandits' is a 1983 kid film that, probably most famous now, as one of the films that a young Nicole Kidman, starred in, before her big breakthrough role, in 1989's 'Dead Calm'. Directed by Brian Trenchard-Smith, the film tells the story of three young BMX riders, P.J. (Angelo D'Angelo), Goose (James Lugton), and Judy (Nicole Kidman), being entangled with a group of bank robbers, when they stole a carton of stolen police walkie-talkies, the gangsters were using to loot. Without spoiling the movie, too much, the first thing, I notice about this film is the really bad pacing issues. For a film about BMX bikes, you really don't see much of it, until the climax of the film. Most of the other parts of the film, has the teens doing a lot of illegal acts like stealing fish traps, vandalism, and other crimes to try to get money to get their bikes, fix, after a clichés obligatory nasty, nameless fat bully (Brian Sloman), cause them to wreck, their bikes with shopping carts, yet not their bodies. Second off, the movie has, this, long pointless really, out of place, horror scene, where the bad guys are chasing the teenagers, through a dark cemetery with scary looking masks. Was this movie, originally supposed to be a horror movie? It really seem, so! The character talk about scary films, way too much. It's like this movie didn't really had some sort of a identify, during the writing period, until they decided to go with the BMX theme, late in production. It's no wonder, why this movie was retitled, 'Short Wave' in America. After all, most of the film, has them, playing with the walkie talkies than riding their bikes. The movie is also, often criticized for having an odd unbalance mixer of Aussie slapstick style comedy and adult-driven action. The police in this film, are absolutely useless, and really doesn't do much, besides, play background chitchat and the rolling shenanigans of the Freddy Mercury and Billy Idol, knock offs, bad guys, Whitey (David Argue) and Moustache (John Ley), during the second and third parts of the film, really doesn't match up with the intense opening part of the film, which makes them, looking like a seriously threat. It's really hard to believe, these were the same guys that were in an intense gun-fight with police, a few minutes ago, during a bank heist, and now, they are, now getting pounded by bunch of preteen kids with bags of flour and soap bubbles. It get weirder for them, as the film had a memorable moment, where the BMX bikers, escape down the Manly Waterworks water slides, complete with BMX bikes, with the villains, coming after them. It's really, jarring, when you think, about it, because you would, think the bank robbers would be smarter than this. Anyways, that climatic silly chase through all of Sydney's stunning location really does go on forever. It got really tiresome, after a while. While the slapstick humor, didn't live up to my standards, at least, the weird dialogue jokes, did. The film had a lot of great one-liners from the three appealing young leads, even if their thick Australian accent, was hard to hear, at times. Their delivery can be a bit bizarre, because, the fact, that I'm American, born in the 1980s. I just wish, I knew, some of the often dated words or foreign slangs they were, often bantering. Who knew, that a trolley mean shopping cart in Australian English? I didn't! Anyways, most of the jokes were harmless and goofy in a fun kind of a way. Decked out in their bright color-coded flashy neon outfits, you really can tell, this was a 1980s film. After all, Nicole Kidman had big ratty red hair perm, seem to want to eat up, the scenery and the boys are often seem, wearing really short shorts. While, their acting was somewhat alright; I have to say, their bikes skills is a bit questionable, as three top BMX bike experts had to be, brought in, to replace the actors, during action scenes. It's sad, that the stunts are all performed with over-dramatized slow motion camera movement and bad sound effects. It really took me, out of the movie. Moreover, Nicole Kidman was doubled by an 18-year-old boy who wore a wig. It was really odd to watch, to watch her character played by a stunt man, do halfpipes ramp with the song, 'I see Boys' by Petra Gaffney playing in the background. Indeed, most the movie's music choices, don't really match, the tone of the film, at all. 'I'm Ready to Fly' (Kangaroo Hop) by the band, 'The Papers', is probably the worst. I had no clue, how the lyrics of the song, relate to what happening on film. That song is torturous. Overall: While, BMX Bandits offers an amusing good times to '80s freestyle bike culture with some bawdy humor and adventure. This movie is incredibly inferior to the 1986's film, 'Rad' in every way. It's good for a one time watch.

So I purchased this because it is early Kidman. I did not expect great acting or a great story and after reading some of the user comments here big chunks of the story actually were a whole lot better than I had expected. Some aspects of the story are blatantly weak, particularly how the police are portrayed, but much is not as weak as all that. It is different to early Sandra Bullock, but part of that might be the age difference. I did not know much about BMX when it was a fashion and this tells me a bit about what those bikes can do. Since watching this I have seen a mature guy, maybe in his twenties, with a pedal bike that seemed to have motor bike wheels and that seems a big step up to my city cycling tyred ATB, but maybe not for the stunt cycling that is in this film. Or normal city cycling. *** The big problem with this DVD, for me, is the image quality. I have a PAL region 2 on the Contender label, 2005, and the sunnier scenes are a bit washed out. I can put up with that. A bigger problem is that the aspect ratio is wrong. This is widescreen letterboxed in 1.78 and measures as 2.38 to 1, approx, but it looks squashed vertically. To get it to look right depends on one's player. On a computer with VLC 8.1 I set preferences/video/source aspect ratio to 16:10 and this played with the image looking about right. If I had a 1.78 screen I would need to use the 16:10 setting and also select the preferences/video/video filter module/crop module and use a manual crop to trim the top, bottom and maybe also the sides. preferences/ Modules/video filter/crop/crop geometry/720x476+0+50. Ie 'width'x'height'+'left offset'+'top offset'. Practical, but thankfully one does not need to do that sort of thing too often. March 2011, 'Woodyanders' posted a comment that a new DVD of this by Severin does show the aspect ratio properly.