Stream It Or Skip It: ‘GTMAX’ On Netflix, Where A French Motorbike Racer Is Forced Into The World Of High-Speed Crime

In GTMax, now streaming on Netflix, a pair of motocross-racing siblings run into trouble when they fall in with a group of heisters in need of precision drivers. Precision drivers? You mean like every Fast & Furious film ever? Exactly. Only instead of cars, the emphasis in GTMax is on souped-up 560cc “mega-scooters” tweaked to be powerful and nimble enough to elude pursuing cops. GTMax was directed by Oliver Schneider, who has been a stunt coordinator for numerous films, including Fast X; Ava Baya stars alongside Jalil Lespert, Gérard Lanvin, Thibaut Evrard, Jérémie Laheurte, and actor and French social media star Riadh “Just Riadh” Belaïche.     

GTMAX: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

The Gist: For Soélie (Baya) and her brother Michael (Belaïche), racing motocross is in the blood. Their father Daniel (Lanvin) is a former champion on the circuit, and today he runs a track in addition to funding the family’s racing team. But when Michael loses a big race at the last second, it’s enough for a frustrated Daniel to admit that their operation is running on financial fumes. (It’s also an early opportunity for the GTMax script to drop in the first of its many cliches. “A runner-up is just the first loser.”) Soélie was always a better racer than Michael. But she swore off competition after a big accident, and the untimely death of her mother. That is until dangerous circumstances demand she return to riding.

All Paris cops like Lieutenant Delvo (Evrard) can do is chase Elyas (Lespert) and his heist crew, which includes Théo (Laheurte) and Yacine (Samir Decazza). Delvo’s team doesn’t have the resources to keep up with the Yamaha TMAX scooters Elyas has fortified with even more power and better handling. And now there’s a selection of rare diamonds arriving in Paris, which Delvo is sure Elyas has plans to steal. (Cliche #2 incoming: “I know how these guys think.”) Suddenly in need of new drivers, Elyas at first taps Michael. But seeing the danger, and totally not trusting Elyas, Soélie soon steps in as both the heisters’ new mechanic and their latest scooter driver. Nobody will get hurt, she and Michael will get paid, and they’ll be able to save their family’s motocross team. Pas un problème, n’est-ce pas?

Of course it becomes a huge problem, with Soélie standing in as a TMAX driver during a major daylight heist in the streets of downtown Paris. Of course her and Michael’s father discovers their extracurricular criminal activities. And of course it’ll come down to Soélie matching her resourcefulness with her considerable skill as a driver to somehow come out unscathed from Elyas’ big plan to lift the diamonds, a plan built with more swagger than contingencies and more holes in it than the spokes of a motorbike’s wheel.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? You could stay with Netflix for an entire film festival of movies similar to GTMax. Like Centauro, where a superbike racer in Spain is forced to become a drug courier, Overhaul, featuring big rig racing and high-stakes heisting in Brazil, and Lost Bullet 2, which co-stars GTMax’s Thibaut Evrard.

Performance Worth Watching: GTMax is Ava Baya’s film. She is tasked with expressing the movie’s emotional core, such as it is, and while the scooter chase sequences put everyone in wraparound helmets with tinted visors – the GTMax stunt team deserves Performance Worth Watching honors, too – Baya keeps Soélie calm, cool, and collected during a few tense scenes in the bike repair garage.  

Memorable Dialogue: “The couple won’t be strong enough. You need to reprogram the mapping to get its full speed, then couple the fork with a tighter –” the heisters cut off Soélie’s confident diagnosis of all the problems with their bikes, but she isn’t fazed. “Your hoses are crap, man.” 

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: “This thing was originally a scooter? A Yahama, I believe, no? So it’s a battle tank disguised as a dirt bike.” It’s cool to hear Ava Baya, as Soélie, deliver a speech similar to Ludacris’s Tej in the Fast films, but remixed so it pertains to heavily modified scooters. And a lot of the close-quarters chase action in GTMax is really solid, with scooters maneuvering through hilly Parisian streets and through blind alleys, and cops and criminals both flying headlong over their handlebars whenever someone T-bones a passing car. But what GTMax could use a lot more of is all of the above. The script spends way too much time establishing a rote series of family conflicts designed to weigh on Soélie as she navigates troublesome criminal waters. As the dogged cop after the bad guys, Thibaut Evrard is eager, but he’s constrained as much by the script as Lieutenant Delvo is by his superiors. In the end, GTMax does not go as hard with its genre signifiers as it probably should have, and feels undercooked and predictable as a result.

Our Call: Skip it. Ava Baya is a highlight in GTMax, as are a few stretches of its mega-scooter action sequences. But the film does not embrace and enhance its genre signifiers enough to outrun a script and pacing that’s TV movie obvious.  

Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.