Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man

Oh my, my. So much testosterone, so little plot. Like, what were you expecting with a title that implicitly tells you that the protagonists are cultural artifacts rather than human characters. This is a movie dedicated to the proposition that “It's better to be dead and cool, than alive and uncool.” This notion is so important that it's repeated a second time at the end of the film in case the concept remains elusive. Mickey Rourke and Don Johnson. Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man. Black leather and blue denim. One naked male tush and lots of day-old beard grizzle. Really, are you still expecting there to be a plot in here somewhere? Well, it's set in the near-future of 1996 and our boys are just born to get into trouble. The “bad guys” want to tear down the boys' favorite bar in order to complete a plan of turning all of Burbank, CA, into an international airport. So “our heroes” hatch a counter-plan to rob a bank and get the money to save the bar. But instead of cash, these Robin Hoods (emphasis on hoods) wind up with a cache of the near-future's new drug: crystal dream -- a retinal activator that's 100 percent addictive. Now there's a movie. But Harley and Marlboro never explore this fictional drug. Drugs are evil (even though it's better to die cool). And let's not even explore the mixed messages the Marlboro Man sends us about smoking. The movie's not bad in the action department, especially if you're a perennial fan of the gun shots and verbal quips combo. But it's so cynical, so brazen about its cardboard iconography, so calculatedly cool, that you just start longing for that crystal dream -- any dream but this one.