Movie Review: The World's Fastest Indian

By Ron Wilkinson Dec 8, 2005, 22:10 GMT

Anthony Hopkins stars as Burt Munro, a man who never let the dreams of youth fade. After a lifetime of perfecting his classic Indian motorcycle, Burt set off from the bottom of the world to test his bike at the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah. With all odds against him, he set a new speed record and captured the spirit of his times. Burt Munro’s 1967 world record remains unbroken ...more

Yankee ingenuity meets the Hell’s Angel of the geriatric set in this sprightly, mostly true, biopic by director-writer Roger Donaldson about the everyman of New Zealand and his hand-built motorcycle.  We know very little about Burt Munro’s life before he turned 70 years old in the early 1960s and became convinced that his back-yard 1920 Indian Scout motorcycle was the fastest in the world.  This estimation was based on trial runs on the beach outside his otherwise quiet town and was not enhanced by his loss to the local motorcycle gang in his only practice race.  Nonetheless, when Burt  was 72 years old and his Indian Scout was 47, they set the world land speed record that still stands today on the Bonneville Salt Flats in the USA.

A man who owned little or nothing, Burt was, in retrospect, a mechanical genius.  He cast his own pistons in his cinderblock garage/house, melting in a little bit of something from a Chevrolet internal organ to give the piston the right flavor.  He drank tea brewed from the rain-barrel that also served as the quench tank for cooling down his castings.  He may not have had a college degree, but he seemed to know what he was doing because in 1967 he set the world land speed record of 201 mph for a streamlined motorcycle of under 1000 cubic centimeters engine displacement.  The fact that he did it on a1920 Indian Scout motorcycle, combined with the fact that the record has not been matched to this day, constitute a miracle comparable to the first powered airplane flight by the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk.

In 1984, Kiwi-Aussie director Roger Donaldson made his first film with Anthony Hopkins.  The film is a perspective of the famous Bounty mutiny adventure that features Captain Bligh’s record-setting open-boat voyage and the subsequent tracking down of his mutinous crew.  In 1971 Donaldson had made a documentary, "Offerings to the God of Speed," about then-72-year-old Burt Munro who a few years earlier had entered into the ranks of New Zealand’s immortal with his un-funded success against all odds in securing the world speed record.  Presumably, this biopic had been simmering in Donaldson ever since.  He offered the dubious opportunity for the lead to the unlikely Anthony Hopkins.  When Hopkins accepted, a film was born.  As the film opens it is impossible not to see Hannibal Lector and one wonders if Hopkins can pull it off.  Will he be able to break out of the role of a demented serial killer to play a mixture of Don Quixote and Thomas Edison?  In the final analysis he succeeds and brings to us a fascinating biopic.

The climactic race, in which Burt records increasingly higher speeds for each mile of the six mile run at Bonneville Salts Flats is filmed in real time, with each mark announced over the loudspeaker.  It has all the majesty befitting that great American hero: the victorious underdog.  The New Zealand renegade/inventor set a new mark for the American renegades to follow.  He was the Andy Warhol of motorcycle racing and, so the story goes, wore a business suit while racing instead of a leather jacket.

Hopkins brings life to Munro and is the saving grace of this film which otherwise would make a better book.  The technical insights are few and far between, but the movie still represents a good Saturday afternoon for motorcycle fans as well as those who still believe that, at least sometimes, personal commitment can win against all odds.

Access media from 'The World's Fastest Indian'.