"All my life I wanted to do something big, something bigger and better than all the other jokers." The World's Fastest Indian tells the tale of Burt Munro (Hopkins) and his attempt to beat the land speed record at the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, 1967, but it is really concerned with a man with no family and his one legacy to a world he is not long for. Taking his personally modified 1920 Indian Twin Scout motorcycle from the small town of Invercargill, New Zealand through Los Angeles and cross-country to Utah proves tough work for the elderly Burt, as his bad heart could give out at any moment and he has little or no money. After financing his trip to the States by working as a cook on a trawler, Burt strikes up a relationship with a Hollywood transvestite in LA, wangles spare parts from a Mexican car dealer and braves the wrath of state troopers to get to his destination and, ultimately, his destiny. The World's Fastest Indian is an old-fashioned straightforward story and a textbook road-movie script. There is nothing here that you haven't seen before and the movie would be redundant if it wasn't for the performance of Hopkins. Although it can be fair to say at times it looks like Anthony Hopkins playing Burt Munro rather than Burt Munro on the screen, Hopkins hasn't inhabited a character so strongly since Remains Of The Day, bringing all of Munro's likeable idiosyncrasies to the fore while his never bombastic, always subtle delivery never threatens to tip Burt over into melodrama.
