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26 out of 34 people found the following review useful:
Best. Movie. Ever., 28 February 2004
1/10
Author: delasky from Austin TEXAS!!!!!

If I was on my deathbed, and my loved ones were gathering around me, and if they asked me if there was anything I wanted to do before I died... I would reply, "Show me BMX Bandits, one last time." Obviously, this will never happen, as I have no loved ones, and in fact will probably die alone. But enough about me.

BMX Bandits is an unparalleled achievement in cinema history, ranking right up there with, "Out of the Body" and "Birth of a Nation." It basically features a nubile NIcole Kidman (in tight BMX pants ;-) ) and her band of mates, Goose, and P.J. Confused? That's because those names are BMX lingo. This film is jam-packed with BMX tomfoolery and other high speed things. Look for a wizend David Argue (remember his role in Gallipoli?) as the colorful crook, "Whitey." Watch as him and his partner-in-crime, John Ley (Mustache) are unable to kill three kids on bikes. Even with a muscle car. And a trunkful of guns. Thrills and chills ensue. Scary Graveyard Hide-and-go seek! Foam fertilizer! Male short shorts! Complicated movie-within-movie descriptions. And one extremely awkward kiss. This movie is not to be missed.

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15 out of 19 people found the following review useful:
It's like The Goonies on wheels!, 28 May 2002
Author: rustinc

Excellent movie. Great stunts. Horrible villains. I'll never forget watching this with my friends. It made us want to catch bad guys and then race bikes. The music is just as much fun. Everyone should see this at least once.

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11 out of 12 people found the following review useful:
australian bicycle exploitation kid-flick that's wheelie good!, 13 January 1999
10/10
Author: Jason Butler (jaydeluxe) from Dublin, Ireland

I went to see BMX Bandits when it first came out with an eleventh birthday party gang of mates. We were mostly BMX fanatics and figured we'd be running out of the cinema pulling pretend stunts on our handy imaginary bikes but alas we'd kinda just wheeled out, a little let down. Cut to many years later and I catch it on saturday afternoon TV and that's when I flip. I was too harsh on the pic as a kid coz i thought it pandered to a younger audience but now looking back on my days as a kid it's got some innocent magic like those british children's film foundation pics. Nicole Kidman is a star and her fellow BMX bandits form a fun team but it's the pursuing criminals that steal the show with their manic and obviously improvised actions and dialogue. And hey, any movie that ends with a flour bomb fight on wheels and a huge explosion of foam [which always renders the baddies useless] it's just gotta be top!

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10 out of 12 people found the following review useful:
Cool movie!, 23 June 2004
Author: Tom Holloway from Sydney

I have similar feelings about this movie as a lot of the other reviewers.

As kids, my friends and I used to rent it at all opportunities. I can still remember fighting in the car over who got to look at the cover!

I watched it again a few years back. The plot seemed silly. The acting was no longer brilliant. Overall it dropped about 2 stars!

But I still enjoyed seeing it again. It was good memories. Of course having Nicole Kidman in one of her first movies ever is also great fun to watch. Who'd have known she'd go on to become such hot property.

P.s. She must spend a fortune keeping her hair straight!

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11 out of 15 people found the following review useful:
The film Nicole doesn't want you to see..., 13 October 2002
Author: dirtychild from Australia

This movie is perfect for a drunken video night at home. Nicole Kidman stars as one of the teenage BMX bandits and a check-out chick at the local supermarket. The kids come across a bunch of stolen walkie-talkies and get caught up with some "nasty" goons. Don't miss the classic going down the Manly waterslides on BMX bikes. Luv Nicole's perm! And the BMX bandits matching outfits! And the goons'"scary" halloween masks!

80's children classic!

A total stinker - but in the "it's so bad it's good" category.

Plus a must see for all those Nicole fans out there.

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7 out of 8 people found the following review useful:
Way better than 'Rad'! (spoilers), 30 September 2005
7/10
Author: Pepper Anne from Orlando, Florida

I'm sure that there have probably been a lot more adventure films centered around BMXing than just BMX Bandits or Rad, but those are all that I have seen as of this writing. And while I thought 'Rad' was far too embarrassingly cheesy and was initially skeptical when I picked up BMX Bandits, BMX Bandits blew 'Rad' right out the water as far as acting, story, humor, and even action sequences.

BMX Bandits is something like an Australian version of the Hardy Boys (plus one girl) mystery on wheels. Three teens desperate for money to not only get new bikes, but also finally fulfill their ambitions for a neighborhood dirt course decide to try and make the cash on their own. Only, their brief, unsuccessful time as fishing entrepreneurs leads them instead to a boat with a mysterious box tied to it. So, they did what any honest citizen would: they cut the rope and claimed the abandoned treasure for themselves. A case full of sophisticated walkie talkies which yield not only a pretty penny as they sell them to the neighborhood kids, but also a lot of trouble as they are chased by their skilled, gangster owners who wish to retrieve their finds and punish the kids for taking them, as well as the cops who think something much more is going on when their radio frequencies are interrupted with the conversations of the three teens on their walkie talkies.

Despite the family film theme, the movie lacks much of the corniness common to the genre, the decade, or the BMX theme. The filmmakers were willing to be a little more daring with the dialog and the story, probably trying to appeal to audiences older than just the pre-teen market and do so in an often humorous manner, thanks mostly to the witty retort of Goose (James Lugton), one of the three main teens. Although, at least for me, one of the drawbacks was a longer-than-necessary conclusion in which the teens and the gangsters duke it out more or less.

Nonetheless, it is an old adventurous cult classic that is well worth checking out.

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25 out of 45 people found the following review useful:
BMX Babel, 15 May 2005
Author: bigbossfilms from United Kingdom

A masterpiece of cinematic quasi-magic-realism, very much in thrall to Godard and Truffaut's aesthetic, replete with a distantiating Verfremdung that evokes Brecht at his most polemically abstruse. The spectator is at once him/herself simulacrum (or indeed fractured cultural mirror) and bearer of celluloid epiphany in this disquisition on unceasing motion, which evokes image as thief (or "bandit" - highwayman) of desire in Debord's ideologically moribund "society of the spectacle". The BMX - the "cycle" - becomes a metonym for life itself, turning as if a wheel on the caprices of youthful abundance and fecundity, to end its superficial existence as a superannuated fad must perish, in a dwindle to aged redundancy. The very nature of recreational cinema is thus called into account; through a mise-en-scene that purposefully and self-reflexively explodes notions of suture and consequent artistic rupture, Bandits holds forth against its own, revolutionary coups de theatre, challenging, distorting and toying with our perceptions of classical justice, the "natural", and the sublimely revolving (yet easily punctured) inner-tube of carnal temporality: thus "spoke" Zarathrustra.

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3 out of 4 people found the following review useful:
Horrible movie, but in the best ways, 18 May 2007
3/10
Author: thebrighteyes from United States

This movie should probably be given a 1 out of 10 by any conventional standards. The acting is terrible, the sound/picture quality is extraordinarily sub-par, and the music is torturous.

The plot is very basic: These criminals decide they want to pull off a big robbery and have some elaborate plan all put together. For the plan to work, however, they need police-band radios so they can hear everything the police are doing. These BMX kids find and steal the radios and the criminals want them back. This is the point where the plot just steps out of the way for the real purpose of the movie: exhibiting "rad" BMX stunts (most of which are just jumping off conveniently placed ramps around the city).

So, these criminals chase these three kids all over the city, basically destroying their own car in the process, to get these radios back; I guess it would be too much trouble to just buy new radios. They chase these kids through a water park, a mall, a soccer field, a warehouse, and a few other locations. This ends up being one of the longest chase scenes in cinematic history.

With all that being said, the movie has great entertainment value because its just so damn cheesy. On top of that, you get to see Nicole Kidman before she knew anything about acting. She also has a stunt double which I'm pretty sure is a man. Oh, and she has one of the CREEPIEST kisses with a boy in an empty grave: I guess romance even strikes when you are sitting only feet away from a rotting corpse.

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7 out of 12 people found the following review useful:
This means everything to me, 18 September 2003
10/10
Author: nodata-2 from Norway

I and my brother rented this movie for our birthdays for, I don't know, something like five years in a row. Even though it might not be a philosophical masterpiece, it's one of the dearest memories I have from my childhood. I gave it a 10. I'm renting it again for my brother's bachelor party. If he ever finds a woman to marry, that is.

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Some can sort of like this feature, v1.01, 2 November 2009
Author: annevejb from UK

So I purchased this because it is early Kidman. I did not expect great acting or a great story and after reading some of the user comments here the story actually was a whole lot better than I had expected.

Some aspects of the story are blatantly weak, particularly how the police are portrayed, but much is not as weak as all that. It is different to early Sandra Bullock, but part of that might be the age difference.

I did not know much about BMX when it was a fashion and this tells me a bit about what those bikes can do. Since watching this I have seen a mature guy, maybe in his twenties, with a pedal bike that seemed to have motor bike wheels and that seems a big step up to my city cycling tyred ATB, but maybe not for the stunt cycling that is in this film. Or normal city cycling.

***

The big problem with this DVD, for me, is the image quality. I have a PAL region 2 on the Contender label, 2005, and the sunnier scenes are a bit washed out. I can put up with that.

A bigger problem is that the aspect ratio is wrong. This is widescreen letterboxed in 1.78 and measures as 2.38 to 1, approx, but it looks squashed vertically.

To get it to look right depends on one's player. On a computer with VLC 8.1 I set preferences/video/source aspect ratio to 16:10 and this played with the image looking about right. If I had a 1.78 screen I would need to use the 16:10 setting and also select the preferences/video/video filter module/crop module and use a manual crop to trim the top, bottom and maybe also the sides. preferences/ Modules/video filter/crop/crop geometry/720x476+0+50. Ie -width-x-height-+-left offset-+-top offset-. Practical, but thankfully one does not need to do that sort of thing too often.

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