REVIEW \ 'The World's Fastest Indian' Road picture is an adorable quest

The character travels halfway around the world in search of his dream.
By ROGER MOORE
ORLANDO SENTINEL
Burt Munro is the sort of old coot who makes an iffy neighbor. He tinkers and putters and cranks up the power tools too early in the morning. He doesn't cut his grass. And he makes it his business to pee on the lemon tree in his yard at least once a day.
But the little boy next door adores him. It takes some effort not to like him. The guy's something of a local character and a local hero.
Because if it can be done on a motorcycle, chances are, Burt has done it. Even well into his 60s and half-deaf, he's still tilting at windmills. He dreams of taking his aged, beloved and much-modified Indian motorcycle (he pronounces it "motor-sicle") to the Bonneville salt flats, to "find out how fast she'll go."
Is she "The World's Fastest Indian"? Burt's dying to know.
"Dying" is right. He has angina and a dodgy prostate. He'll probably never get the chance. But darned if his neighbors, the good folks of Invercargill, New Zealand, and we don't want to see him get the chance, to at least go out in the blaze of glory that he seems to crave.
Labor of love
Anthony Hopkins stars in this absolutely adorable quest, a road picture that takes this Kiwi codger on an odyssey halfway around the world and across the American West in pursuit of a dream.
It's a labor of love for New Zealand director Roger Donaldson ("Thirteen Days," "The Recruit," "Species"), who leaves Hollywood behind to return to his roots -- he did a documentary about Burt Munro very early in his career.
Hopkins leaves his proper-Brit speech and mannerisms far behind to play perhaps the most romantic hero of his career, and Donaldson lovingly presents this dreamer who only wanted one bit of fame "before I fall off the perch, before I kick the old bucket."
"The World's Fastest Indian" is an old-fashioned feel-good movie, a world peopled by grown-ups and gearheads, all inspired by a man who has aged beyond fear, who comes alive in those "five minutes, going flat out on a bike," and who long ago realized, "if you don't go when you wanna go, when you do go, you'll find you've gone."