Spetters

You can sense the self-satisfaction Verhoeven is enjoying here after three successful action films. So he ambitiously rolls out one storyline after another, tackling each one as the mood takes him, and throws in quotes from himself ("We're going to do it like in Turkish Delight".), Coppola (orange foreshadows disaster), and Wyler (in his own words, he tried to make the race closer to the Ben-Hur experience). Taken together, it's kind of a hodgepodge, though the individual scenes work well thanks to Verhoeven's bravura execution, often trying to cram as much information as possible into one shot while sparing no actors. They're otherwise another weak point of the story, though, as they overact madly and act like they're eight years old. Which is otherwise a general problem (?) of the director's characters, which obviously stems from his misanthropy. Plus, one of the central trio looks like a young Anton Chigurh, which can easily change your entire reading of the film. I suppose I can see what the point was here, if it was meant to be some sort of deconstruction and demythification of the post-Greaser motorcycle culture, but the filmmaker was simply overwhelmed by his own grandiosity and arrogance here. Then again, if it's really because of this film that Verhoeven wasn't put in charge of directing Return of the Jedi, I can't complain. By the way, after this film, there was supposedly a National Anti-Spetters Commission in the Netherlands, which set out to make it impossible for a director to get his next films financed based on but not limited to his portrayals of gays, women, police officers, or members of the clergy. Verhoeven was eventually banished to the States to make movies and actually unofficially started Twitter. (04/01/2021)