Rating:

The folks at the American Film Institute would have you believe they know best, but if I made a list of the 100 greatest movies, Easy Rider wouldn’t be anywhere near it. It defines an era and an attitude, they say. It encapsulates the disenfranchised soul-searching of an entire generation, they say. Twaddle! The truth is that this movie, as Oscar Madison might say, is garbage.

Praise it all you like, but you’ll never convince me that it’s anything more than what it appears to be on the surface—a rambling mish-mash of a low budget biker film, where everyone involved was high all the time and it shows. Despite having Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson in its cast, Easy Rider never stands out as any better than the grainy, pointless motorcycle flicks Joel and his robots would sometimes watch on Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Fonda and Hopper smuggle some narcotics in from Mexico to fun their retirement, with a spiritual journey to Mardi Gras planned along the way. In the course of their travels encounter a couple of groups of people who do nothing and don’t matter before finally meeting up with a lawyer for the ACLU (Nicholson) and a couple of higher-end prostitutes (Karen Black and Toni Basil, both of whom were, against all reason, allowed to appear in movies). At no point in the proceedings do I care about these characters, not who they are, why they’re here, what they’re doing or where they’re going. Each character is a faceless blur, going aimlessly about his business and spouting marijuana-fueled paranoia in supremely drab fashion. It couldn’t be less interesting if the whole movie took place at a meeting of a town zoning commission.

The worst sequence of all is no doubt the extended collage of unpleasant sights and sounds as the characters are tripping balls in New Orleans. The players stand around acting stupid for eight or ten years, endearing themselves to me even less then they had over the course of the rest of the picture. Perhaps audiences at the time found it cool—even groovy—to see shit like this, but I think even then that could be true only of the most easily impressed viewers. From a modern perspective it plays as little more than a quaint relic, a laughable throwback to those terrible late-sixties faux-hip acid movies. We’ve realized we should ignore the rest of those films, but for some reason we keep hanging on to this one. Really, we should throw it out with the rest.

The movie’s greatest flaw, though, are the characters. They’re unlikable—Fonda is always condescending and Hopper won’t shut up with his nonsensical paranoid ramblings—but they’re so otherwise devoid of characteristics that they’re impossible to relate to. They’re utterly meaningless and featureless; each could be exchanged with another, or with anything at all, and you’d never notice the difference. Even as they start dying, you just don’t give a shit. “Oh, that guy’s dead? Whatever.” And if there’s one thing I know about movies, it’s that if you don’t have a story you’d better have compelling characters. If you don’t have a story and your audience doesn’t even care when the characters get killed, you are in serious trouble.

So yeah, it’s a complete baffling mystery to me why this movie is heralded as some kind of classic, or why it appears on this list of the 100 greatest; in fact, I could probably list 1,000 movies I’d rather watch. Sure, it’s got a good soundtrack, but I could listen to that any time without having to look at endless shots of people crossing bridges or hearing Jack Nicholson barely able to move his lines from his dope-addled brain to his mouth. It’s time we recognize this movie for what it is and kick it out of the company of true classics. It doesn’t come close to deserving to be there.

If You Hated This, You Will Also Totally Hate:

• Yankee Doodle Dandy
• Melted Reel Presents: AFI’s 100 Movies, and Whether They Suck
• Psycho
• Star Wars
• E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial