Easy riders get their motors running in Freebird, a druggy Brit-com about Hell's Angels on two wheels (and copious quantities of magic mushrooms). Gary Stretch (Dead Man's Shoes) hops on his Harley to play motorcycle courier Fred, who's off to Wales to pick up a batch of homegrown grass with mates Tyg (Geoff Bell) and Grouch (Phil Daniels). Chock full of hallucinogenic interludes, Welsh-speaking bikers and tarot-card reading hippies, it's a bizarre ride to the far side of British cinema.
Anyone expecting this amiable biker flick to be Blighty's answer to Wild Hogs is in for a shock. As free-spirited as its title suggests, it avoids the usual Brit-movie clichés and strikes it own path, taking in everything from the Beast of Brecon to a hulking, mute Welshman in a Lucha Libre mask who could have strayed in from Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior. Yet the madcap comedy only gives it so much momentum before it's dragged off-course by some ropey acting (bearded Stretch wanders around blankly like an out-of-work George Michael impersonator) and an undercooked screenplay that never makes much out of its central theme of aging bikers on a collision course with responsibility.
"BIKERS' VERSION OF WITHNAIL & I"
High points (and we do mean high) mainly centre around Phil Daniels' shambolic biker Grouch, a man so stoned he still thinks he's at Glastonbury in 1987. Playfully updating his iconic scooter-riding role in Quadrophenia, Daniels throws himself into the film's druggy middle section - basically an extended gag in which the giggling, stoned heroes wander around a Welsh village trying to buy Maltesers as writer-director Jon Ivay blows his budget on some entertaining CGI hallucinations. Riotously funny, this sequence is the British biker's version of Withnail & I and would have made a great short. Here, though, it's just a welcome break from the otherwise uninspired proceedings.
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