Free Style Movie Review

Cale Bryant harbors big dreams. Pretty ironic, considering the boy never seems to sleep.

Cale is an up-and-coming motocross racer--a talented rider with a meager sponsorship, a good track record (so to speak) and the ambition to make it to the lucrative pro circuit. He devotes every spare minute to the sport: training, tinkering with his bike, racing.

But for Cale, spare moments are as rare as vegan NASCAR fans. The fledgling rider has two jobs--one as a worker bee at an electronics outlet, another as a pizza delivery guy--and uses the checks to patch his family's leaky economic boat. Cale's dad took off long ago, and his mom (Jeanette) can't make ends meet by just working at the local diner--not and study for college at the same time, anyway. So Cale, the de facto man of the house, serves as the family breadwinner. Barely out of high school, he's living paycheck to paycheck, hoping one day to make it to the motocross version of the Bigs and give his family a better life.

Weird how things rarely work out the way you plan, isn't it? 

One night while delivering pizzas, Cale catches his girlfriend smooching his motocross archrival, the rich and arrogant Derek Black. Cale goes nuts and smashes a car window. And when the police come, he bolts. Things get smoothed out later that evening, but the damage is done: Cale's forced to pay for the window, a speeding ticket and, worst of all, his sponsorship is yanked, leaving him bikeless and raceless. Seems his dream is done.

Unless, of course, Cale can find a beat-up motorcycle that he can somehow patch up and make his own. Unless he can manage to take a third job to earn money for spare parts and the registration for the biggest race of the year. And unless somehow he can get a new sponsor to foot the rest of the bill.

But, really, what would the odds be of all that happening? 

"You don't always get to be who you want to be, Cale," his mom tells him. 

This is true. And it's a truth that's rarely told in the confines of a movie such as this. In the

  High School Musical movies, where Free Style star Corbin Bleu cut his teeth, we see dreams come true at every turn. And while I'm an incurable optimist who loves happy endings, even I know that sometimes, in real life, things don't work out the way we'd like them to. 

Not that the film stops there or descends into helplessly fatalistic melancholy. It insists that, regardless of the cards we've been dealt, we can all improve our odds through dedication and hard work. Cale is the poster boy for this outlook, but he's not the only one. We learn that Alex's father, a strict-but-loving dad, came to America with the hopes of escaping the poverty of his native Mexico; he labored for nine years here before he felt financially stable enough to send for his family.

And Free Style doesn't stop there, either. Lessons lurk around every bend. Through Cale, the audience is spoon-fed morals on friendship, responsibility, forgiveness and family. 

Its language is harsher than HSM's, and the themes are more mature. But in a day when films are made primarily to take stuff--your $10, your two hours--Free Style is the rare movie that wants to give something back: a worthwhile message that, if you take it to heart, might help smooth out the road--er, track--ahead.