HARD MILES - Mark Reviews Movies

Hard Miles, Blue Fox Entertainment

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 18, 2024

Cycling is more than a sport in Hard Miles, just as its nearly 800-mile bike trek from Colorado to the Grand Canyon is more than a sightseeing tour. Co-writer/director RJ Daniel Hanna's movie wears its metaphors and parallels on its sleeve but never really gets at the human story beneath them.

It definitely doesn't in terms of the characters who matter. They're a quartet of students—or inmates, depending on whom one asks—at a correctional school. Basically, they're teenagers who have committed and been convicted of some kind of crime but are given a second chance to prove being reformed without being sent to a juvenile prison. We get the basics about the personalities and backgrounds of the four teens who decide to make that lengthy bicycle ride, but it's obvious that Hanna and co-screenwriter Christian Sander mainly see them as the means to the movie's feel-good ends.

The real protagonist here is Greg Townsend (Matthew Modine), the shop teacher at the school and an amateur cyclist. He's a man who rides for exercise, since he has health problems involving his ligaments and heart, and to clear his mind of the remnants of a terrible childhood. His father, currently in hospice care at a facility near the route, didn't want his son to appear "weak," and in the process of forcing a young Greg to participate in a strict exercise regiment, he was more directly abusive, too. As an adult, Greg won't talk about it with anyone, and despite repeated calls from his incarcerated brother, he has no plans of visiting his dying father, either.

The story sets up all of this and hints at the teacher having a more direct connection to his students than they think possible, but it's really about the bike ride. Initially, Greg has his shop class—made up of Smink (Jackson Kelly), Woolbright (Jahking Guillory), Atencio (Damien Diaz), and Rice (Zachary T. Robbins), who are only referred to by their surnames in an impersonal touch—build their own bikes. He wants to teach them something about hard work paying off with a tangible thing that's theirs and only theirs, and some lessons about the makeup and particular roles of a riding team come in handy quickly, too.

The school is in financial trouble, having to do with state funding being redirected toward a more incarceration-focused model, so the principal (played by Leslie David Baker) asks Greg to take a group of students on a camping trip that will look good to the government and other potential donors. Since Greg already had his bike ride planned and the four teens understand some basics of riding, he suggests the students, as well as the school's social worker Haddie (Cynthia Kaye McWilliams), tag along on his ride. That way, they'll learn more important lessons about working hard, pushing beyond one's real or perceived limitations, and life in general.

On the surface, the movie gives us exactly what it promises: an inspirational sports story about the grueling activity and satisfying rewards of getting on a bike and riding to a set destination. As such, there are training and riding montages, as the filmmakers follow the ragtag team of cyclists through cities and small towns, up and down mountainous roads, and across grand stretches of desert highway. They have to deal with the heat, exhaustion, and some in-fighting, since most of the members of the group are trying to prove how tough they are to the others.

Mostly, though, all of this is an excuse for Greg to repeatedly vocalize the story's assorted points about the importance of hard work, having a goal, working together as a team, using frustration and anger in beneficially productive way, and not letting assorted obstacles get in the way of goal. We expect the coaches in movies such as this to have a Big Speech or two, summarizing every lesson that has been or needs to be learned, at some point or points in this kind of story. The majority of Greg's dialogue feels as if it's made up of supportive clichés or just part of an extended, drawn-out monologue about the movie's lessons. Modine comes across as down-to-earth enough that the realization takes some time, but regardless, that's his character's primary characteristic.

That leaves the teens to bicker, gradually figure out how to more or less work together, and vaguely offer some personal history that lets us know how they ended up in the school and what struggles they're facing. Smink, for example, is dealing with an eating disorder, while Atencio became caught up in gang activity through a cousin. Woolbright's the one holdout for taking riding seriously, leading to the one scene that comes closet to the teacher and one of his students having a connection that goes deeper than the superficial elements of cycling as a practice and a metaphor.

Hard Miles sticks to the broad strokes of its characters and story. For something like this to be genuinely inspiring, it has to get at something more specific about both of those elements.

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