BMX Bandits

This family film involves three juveniles (including a very tall, very lovely, Nicole Kidman), wacky criminals, and even wackier cops. It reminds me a lot of the films Disney made for TV in the 1970's. Kids of course would not last long against guns, but movies are about living out our fantasies. What better fantasy than fighting crime on BMX while checking out the lovely scenery and lovely Nicole Kidman?

I went to see BMX Bandits when it first came out with an eleventh birthday party gang of mates. We were mostly BMX fanatics and figured we'd be running out of the cinema pulling pretend stunts on our handy imaginary bikes but alas we'd kinda just wheeled out, a little let down. Cut to many years later and I catch it on saturday afternoon TV and that's when I flip. I was too harsh on the pic as a kid coz i thought it pandered to a younger audience but now looking back on my days as a kid it's got some innocent magic like those british children's film foundation pics. Nicole Kidman is a star and her fellow BMX bandits form a fun team but it's the pursuing criminals that steal the show with their manic and obviously improvised actions and dialogue. And hey, any movie that ends with a flour bomb fight on wheels and a huge explosion of foam [which always renders the baddies useless] it's just gotta be top!

Excellent movie. Great stunts. Horrible villains. I'll never forget watching this with my friends. It made us want to catch bad guys and then race bikes. The music is just as much fun. Everyone should see this at least once.

No childhood is complete without a fantastically expensive and frivolous fad, and the BMX bike was one such item - and one which I could even take part in (skateboarding was definitely not for me, as I was incapable of standing on one). Who would have thought that Australia, and the king of ozploitation cinema Brian Trenchard-Smith, would produce the movie to capture the zeitgeist of the colourful bicycles. I first saw this film in 1984 at a film club (basically a small room with a projector and screen, filled with us poor kids, whose parents wanted us out of the house).

Three kids, Goose (James Lugton), P.J. (Angelo D'Angelo), and Judy (Nicole Kidman), spend their summer holidays riding around on their bikes, attempting to get into mischief. They stumble across a box containing walkie-talkies (that's massive pre-mobile phone, communication boxes), that belong to a gang of bank robbers. Once the criminals (crims to use the colloquial term) discover that these pesky kids have "stolen" the items, a hapless pair (Whitey (David Argue) and Moustache (John Ley)), chase the trio around the seaside town, with comic effect.

Of course this is a silly film, it is completely unadulterated fun, and doesn't have the ubiquitous saccharine kids of an American "kids" film, and do not fall prey to the kind of posh-kids found in Enid Blyton's Famous Five stories. The young cast never become annoying, and hold the film together throughout. This is how us kids spent our summer holidays back in the day. Nowadays, children miss out on this sense of freedom, and completely lose out on creating mischief, as parents fear "stranger danger" which has been perpetuated by our "objective" media (thanks for that!). I'm going to end on an appeal: Parents out there, let your kids run free, let them get into trouble whilst cycling with friends in a summer sense of autonomy - if you don't believe me when I state that this will enrich your children, then watch this film and see what happens.

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I'm sure that there have probably been a lot more adventure films centered around BMXing than just BMX Bandits or Rad, but those are all that I have seen as of this writing. And while I thought 'Rad' was far too embarrassingly cheesy and was initially skeptical when I picked up BMX Bandits, BMX Bandits blew 'Rad' right out the water as far as acting, story, humor, and even action sequences.

BMX Bandits is something like an Australian version of the Hardy Boys (plus one girl) mystery on wheels. Three teens desperate for money to not only get new bikes, but also finally fulfill their ambitions for a neighborhood dirt course decide to try and make the cash on their own. Only, their brief, unsuccessful time as fishing entrepreneurs leads them instead to a boat with a mysterious box tied to it. So, they did what any honest citizen would: they cut the rope and claimed the abandoned treasure for themselves. A case full of sophisticated walkie talkies which yield not only a pretty penny as they sell them to the neighborhood kids, but also a lot of trouble as they are chased by their skilled, gangster owners who wish to retrieve their finds and punish the kids for taking them, as well as the cops who think something much more is going on when their radio frequencies are interrupted with the conversations of the three teens on their walkie talkies.

Despite the family film theme, the movie lacks much of the corniness common to the genre, the decade, or the BMX theme. The filmmakers were willing to be a little more daring with the dialog and the story, probably trying to appeal to audiences older than just the pre-teen market and do so in an often humorous manner, thanks mostly to the witty retort of Goose (James Lugton), one of the three main teens. Although, at least for me, one of the drawbacks was a longer-than-necessary conclusion in which the teens and the gangsters duke it out more or less.

Nonetheless, it is an old adventurous cult classic that is well worth checking out.