This week the Bad Dads ride across South America with The Motorcycle Diaries, Walter Salles’s 2004 drama starring Gael García Bernal as young Ernesto Guevara and Rodrigo de la Serna as Alberto Granado.
Before the main feature, the Dads count down their favourite movie motorcycles, from Arnie’s shotgun-reloading Harley in Terminator 2 to Tom Cruise going full Cruise in Top Gun and Mission: Impossible, the Easy Rider chopper, Indy’s sidecar, Tron’s light cycles, Dumb and Dumber’s scooter, John Wick’s katana bike fight, Fonzie’s Knucklehead and Dan’s beloved World’s Fastest Indian.
What We Covered
- Top 5 Motorcycles: a surprisingly rich category covering choppers, scooters, sidecars, sci-fi bikes, stunt riding and Tom Cruise’s apparent allergy to helmets.
- La Poderosa: the battered Norton 500 that carries Ernesto and Alberto until it absolutely cannot, giving the film its comic engine and its road-movie shape.
- Memory vs rewatch: Sidey remembers seeing the film at the cinema and discovers he had misremembered the pair as having one bike each.
- Ernesto and Alberto: the Dads enjoy the friendship, the teasing, the appetite for adventure, and Alberto’s role as a funny, earthy foil to Ernesto’s more serious awakening.
- A journey through inequality: miners, indigenous communities, poverty, illness and exploitation gradually turn the trip from lads’ adventure into political education.
- The leper colony: the San Pablo section becomes the emotional centre of the film, especially Ernesto’s refusal to accept easy divisions between people.
- Che without the T-shirt: the group discuss how the film shows the conditions that could radicalise someone without reducing Guevara to a poster, slogan or merch logo.
- Show, don’t tell politics: Sidey praises the film for making its points quietly; Reegs notes the documentary-like authenticity; Cris reflects on education, knowledge and the ability to imagine different power structures.
- Travel as transformation: Dan highlights the idea that any journey like this, at that age and through those conditions, would inevitably change you.
- Final images: the airport farewell, the real Alberto, the closing text and the real photographs give the film a wistful, reflective ending.
Key Quotes / Moments
- “I thought they had a motorcycle each.”
- “I need your clothes, your boots and your motorcycle.”
- “Top five motorcycles. I’m amazed that we’ve not done this before.”
- “He’s not the same me anymore.”
- “It doesn’t ram his ideology down your throat.”
- “A strong recommend all round.”
Verdict
A strong recommend from the Dads. The Motorcycle Diaries is praised as warm, funny, beautiful and quietly powerful — a road movie about friendship, privilege, poverty and the moment a person starts to see the world differently.
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