Here’s a conversation that I’m pretty sure is going on in Hollywood right this very moment.  A young pretty woman is talking to some ‘producer’ about an alleged movie he’s making and this ‘producer’ asks this pretty young woman ‘What have you been in?’  She, as well as about 500 other pretty women who look eerily similar to this one, despite their different hair color, skin color and eye color will invariably reply “I was in ‘Redline’.”  There wasn’t much to ‘Redline’ but there were a lot of pretty women around to look at.  Women at parties, women doing stretching exercises, women having pillow fights, women watching cars go real fast and women just lounging around.  I am willing to bet that any male associated with this film during its creation used the golden pick up line on any halfway pretty girl he saw ‘You wanna be in a movie?’  Hopefully everybody got what they wanted, because it was at our expense.

Nadia Bjorlin plays Natasha Martin and is your average crystal blue-eyed, copper skinned, c-cup sporting modern renaissance woman as she is the lead singer of her pop band ‘Moving Violations’, runs her own after market hot rod tune up shop, and has skills behind the steering wheel that would make Danica Patrick whisper ‘damn’.  On the other side we have Carlo (Nathan Phillips) the sullen kung fu fighting war vet who has just returned from Iraq and is mighty concerned when his baby brother Jason (Jesse Johnson) picks him up at the bus station wheeling a quarter million dollar Lamborghini.  I think.  I don’t know fancy cars too well considering I drive an eight year old Kia with broken out windows.  Jason is racing for his psychopathic uncle Michael (Angus Macfadyen) who Carlo despises because he ‘destroyed their family’.  How Michael ‘destroyed the family’  is not made too terribly clear, but silly things like words, plot and character development would have take precious time away from the hot chicks and the fast cars and we can’t very well have that now can we?

Natasha may be able to drive real fast, but ever since her race car dad perished in a race she doesn’t get down like that anymore, but super music producer Infamous (Eddie Griffin) has tricked her into driving for him in a big street race with some heavy hitters.  The race between Carlo’s brother Jason and Natasha ends tragically leaving Carlo to blame his uncle Michael and swear revenge.  Michael has also kidnapped Natasha as he has determined that he wants to spend the rest of his life with her.  I think that’s illegal.  As if this were possible the movie gets even sillier when Carlo goes Commando and storms Michael’s villa and then Natasha’s mother gets kidnapped but somehow we have to get to a big race at the end of the movie someway so we can have the day saved.  Or something.

I don’t quite know what to tell you about ‘Redline’ as I sat in my home with my awesome sound setup that I often brag about watching this thing with my mouth open for almost its entire running time.  There was nothing singularly good about this movie, not even the women because to keep it the realm of PG-13 there was no nudity.  Nadia Bjorlin does give us an extremely brief ‘back of the tit’ shot but certainly nothing to run out to Blockbuster for.  This is obviously a film where the producers sat around and decided that they needed to make a movie with hot cars and plenty of chicks, cast it, hired a director and then as an afterthought decided that maybe a script would be nice.  Though Nadia Bjorlin is easy to look at she’s not much of an actress and I’m guessing they cast a rather moribund Nathan Phillips so he wouldn’t show her up since neither actor showed much range.  Angus Macfadyen has made chewing up scenery and overacting his calling card, as he showed in the film ‘.45’ and does as much, if to a slightly lesser degree in this film, and Eddie Griffin has yet rise to the promise he showed in ‘Under Cover Brother’.

Director Andy Cheng does keep this exercise in silliness moving, but not fast enough to keep your mind from focusing on how bad this thing is, say like ‘Torque’ managed to do.  The cars were really pretty though, and there were a few car crashes and explosion here and there but alas, it wasn’t enough. 

There’s not a lot to recommend here and I want to say if you like… fill in the blank.. you’ll dig ‘Redline’, but there are other movies that do what ‘Redline’ tries to do much better, be it racing, hot chicks, stupid story, slick editing or kung fu fighting.  Rent ‘Tokyo Drift’ or get a used copy of ‘Midnight Racing’ for you video game system and you’ll probably have more fun there than watching ‘Redline’.