Reviewed by Michael Edwards
Stars Phil Daniels, Gary Stretch, Geoff Bell, Alun ap Brinley, Peter Bowles,
Gwenllian Davies, Marcus Gilbert, Jonathan Holmes, Jon Ivay | Written by Jon Ivay
UK certification 15 | UK RRP £19.99 | DVD Region 2 | Runtime 89 minutes | Directed by Jon Ivay
From the producers behind Layer Cake and Snatch, and starring cult British actor Phil Daniels (Quadprophenia) alongside household names Geoff Bell and Gary Stretch comes this totally uninspired drivel which marks a low point in the careers of these waning nearly–men.
Trying to create a fusion of Easy Rider and Wild Hogs, Freebird falls somewhere miserably in between with its tale of three middle-aged bikers who set out on a road trip to Wales to each overcome their personal traumas which have started to sink in: Fred (Stretch) heads off with the aim of not returning empty handed, retarded stoner Grouch (Daniels) wants to get the open road out of his system before he moves in with his inexplicably rich and beautiful girlfriend and Tyg (Bell) wants to find out what kind of moron would think of such a stupid name. No, not really, he has apparently never left London and wants to see somewhere that's not London. They then head off, get really stoned, take magic mushrooms with predictably formulaic and uninteresting consequences and get into scrapes with other biker gangs.
The jokes are crude and poorly crafted, and the visual humour derived from the formulaic drug scenes steadily drained the life out of me as I winced and squirmed my way through 89 minutes of poo jokes, drunken people falling over and encounters with more and more pitiful stereotypes of biker gang members and Welshman. If the film attempted any sort of profound insight from the trips (pardon the pun) of these 2D middle–aged journeymen it is hidden well beneath a thickly spread layer of inane truisms like "I'm going to sort myself out one day" and the moral at the end of the film, delivered by a stoner who is growing loads of marijuana in the countryside of Wales (for God's sake people?!), amounts to the following pronouncement: "I know what I know, and I know three things. Be true, listen and change. Oh, and there's a fourth thing, try and help others and not just yourself." Seriously?! Is that it?
Not only is it fucking weak to only know three things, but to then realise that you can't count and suggest a fourth does not bode well for the quality of the wisdom to follow. And sure enough you have to agree that there have been less vague and more useful pronouncements in those daily horoscopes of the "coffee break" section of daily newspapers. Now I think about it, next time a film with any of these people attached appears I'll just do a fucking crossword.
EXTRAS ** A directors' commentary that is actually more boring than the movie itself, a 26 minute making of documentary, deleted scenes, a photo gallery which looks like some holiday snaps from a family of caravaners, and cast and crew interviews are worth watching just because Phil Daniels is damn cool. But even they get boring after 5 minutes. Oh, and the obligatory theatrical trailer.