Torque has the same relationship to The Fast and the Furious as the Vin Diesel film had to the decades-old car-chase pictures that inspired it — it's a homage/rip-off. Splashy but shallow, it aims to create nothing more impressive than 81-minutes of satisfactory trash, nothing more profound than a succession of ever-more abstract moving images invoking impossible sensations of speed. If it's lacking much in the way of distinction, it benefits from an abundance of panache.

The story is an agreeable but zipless potboiler about rival biker gangs who get tangled up in a plot involving a standing grudge between nice-guy Cary Ford (Martin Henderson) and drug-running bad-dude Henry James (Matt Schulze). Yes, Henry James. You know Henry's a bad dude because he kills Ice Cube's brother and frames Cary for it — putting the Cube and the cops both on his tail for the rest of the movie.

Like The Fast and the Furious, Torque pretends to be about a subculture — there's even a scene where some thrill-seeking yuppies getting their weekend yuks on a crotchrocket get taken down a few notches by the disgusted, ostensibly genuine, bikers — but these folks are as plain-vanilla as movie people get. Still, the shorthand is amusing. The righteous Ford struts his way through the movie wearing a Ramones T-shirt and, improbably, a biker jacket that has “Carpe Diem” printed across the front in huge, unmissable letters. (“The Torque cast wears some of the hippest leatherwear ever seen on screen,” declares the press kit. Well, OK then!) Across the moral divide, a thuggish Max Beesley sports a Motorhead shirt. Maybe Lemmy should hire an image consultant.

If the key action sequences are obviously CG-enhanced — watching The Fast and the Furious, it was at least easy to pretend that the race sequences were real — they're still pretty cracking. One involves a motorcycle chase that culminates atop a speeding train; another one has the characters zooming through a grove of palm trees saturated with brilliant green-yellow sunlight. And the climactic chase through Los Angeles city streets benefits from an intensely visual conception that has the downtown landscape blurring and melting horizontally across the screen. All of this stuff is unexpectedly gorgeous; easily the most breathtaking shot in the whole film comes during the opening sequence as the film's three biker buddies zoom up a California highway, a panoramic view of slowly spinning wind turbines filling the widescreen landscape behind them.

Director Joseph Kahn has been working the music-video angle for years, first as a cinematographer and then as a director. My favorites are probably George Michael's self-consciously cheeky “Freeek!” and especially Monster Magnet's hilarious “Space Lord,” a self-aware send-up of the rap videos where Kahn cut his teeth (he was director of photography on the Hype Williams clip for Mase's “Feels So Good,” which “Space Lord” rips to uncanny perfection). That glossy sense of humor has migrated to the movie business — there's a hysterical sequence in Torque where a pretty blonde Monet Mazur and a gothed-out Jaime Pressley, playing the film's good-girl/bad-girl rivals (rockers versus punks! rockers versus punks!), face off for a motorcycle catfight. As they pivot on their bikes to face each other, one is shown framed in front of a Pepsi mural, the other in front of a Mountain Dew mural. It's product placement in the shameless extreme, and yet in the timing, the angles, and the choice of shots, it's very funny. I'd argue that it's also autocritical of the text in which it appears — not quite as reflexive as the Wal-Mart sequence in Looney Tunes: Back in Action, but still functioning as explicit acknowledgement that both filmmakers and viewers should be well aware of how dumb this stuff is. And in that, it makes a decent argument for its own intelligence.