Is FortNine’s New Movie "Yalla Habibi!" Actually Worth $9.99?

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In this review, Annick evaluates FortNine’s adventure film, Yalla Habibi!, which documents a high-stakes attempt to circumnavigate the globe in 20 days. She praises the production quality and the "edutainment" style of the creators, noting that the movie successfully transitions their popular YouTube format into a feature-length cinematic experience. She also highlights a companion interview from the Driven to Ride podcast, which provides behind-the-scenes context regarding the team’s choice of Ducati motorcycles and their surprisingly minimalist approach to riding gear. Annick emphasizes that the film is particularly inspiring for motorcyclists during the winter off-season, offering a raw look at the physical and mental toll of long-distance records. While she mentions minor audio issues for non-native speakers, she ultimately concludes the film is well worth the purchase price for its sense of genuine adventure. This overview serves as both a testimonial to FortNine’s expertise and a call for enthusiasts to share and support high-quality motorcycle media.

Purchase FortNine's "Yalla Habibi!" movie HERE!

Driven to Ride Podcast Episode on The Barber Museum.

Driven to Ride Podcast Episode with FortNine.

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Transcript

FortNine "Yalla Habibi!" Movie

Annick: Hello, beautiful Motorheads. It's Annick. So is the new FortNine movie worth watching? And before we even get into that, I wanna talk a little bit about how I even found out about FortNine.

 * INTRO *

Annick: As you can see, it is the middle of winter. It's cold and uh, it's about 21 degrees. And if you are- fahrenheit. And if you are international, then we are, we're talking about, I think negative 20 Celsius. That's neither here nor there. So is the FortNine movie worth watching?

Well, what might be a little bit humorous is that I didn't even know that FortNine existed until this year. I find the funny thing is that you can be on social media or YouTube or any of these things and just not even know that something exists. And we think that the algorithm will just put all this information in front of us, which it does, but sometimes it's a little bit arbitrary. Right?

So I've been on YouTube for I don't know since 2008. I'm not, I don't know. It doesn't matter. But the fact is, is that FortNine, had never even crossed my algorithm or any of my suggestions, right? So a friend goes to me, we were talking about, uh. About FÉROCE and the channel and doing these videos, the podcasts and all that. And they're like, you know, um, you should really make your videos just like FortNine. And I'm like, FortNine.

And I'm thinking in my head, like, Fortnite, like the video game. I'm like, I was so confused. I was like, what is this person talking about? So. I'm like, all right. People always have suggestions about , what I should do with this channel, what I should do with the podcast, what videos I should make, et cetera, et cetera.

And people love to voice their opinions and, uh, tell you what they think. So. I had to check out who FortNine was, and I watched 10 seconds of a video and I started dying of laughter because I was like, okay, let's be realistic here. And just point out that FortNine is basically the Canadian version of Revzilla.

they are a motorcycle company that sells gear, parts, et cetera, et cetera. They have a huge budget and they've been doing their video work for at least 10 years, and the things that really stood out to me about FortNine was just how awesome their video production is, and the host, Ryan F nine is amazing, like this guy.

He's great. if you haven't caught any of these episodes by, or if you've never followed FortNine, and I know you're probably like Annick your day late, the dollar short, and I get that because they have almost 2.5 million subscribers, which is a lot. That also means that. You know, most people don't subscribe to channels, so they probably have 5 million viewers all the time, which is a lot of people worldwide and their videos are excellent.

They're so well produced. They do a lot of what I would call edutainment on motorcycling, and they really are able to distill complex motorcycling, scientific ideas to very playful, fun explanation. And what they're really good at is doing these one solo long take shots where Ryan will walk and the filmographer or the video guy will basically just follow him in get these awesome shots.

So major hats off to them. They're amazing. I wanna give this background and I also just wanna mention them because if you are like me and they never crossed your algorithm, which. I guess that happens, right? You might wanna check out who they are. So I am going to, put all this information in the show notes 'cause I'm gonna talk about a lot of different inspirations and people and such in things during this short podcast today.

This also brings me to my friends over at Driven To Ride, which is a podcast. Now, Mark Long, who is the host, uh, does Driven to Ride with Matthew Miles. But Mark Long, I had as an interview here, which you'll find that also in the links in the show note.

And Mark has also had me on his podcast, well, a couple of weeks ago I had, uh, been driving, which is, you know, I drive a lot. And I was, listening to his podcast on the Barber Museum. This is all gonna make sense in a second. The Barber Museum was such a great episode.

 It was so good that I reached out to Mark and said, Hey buddy, I just wanna let you know that was such an awesome episode. You nailed it. And it is just so well produced and edited. hats off my friend. And he said to me, well, thank you. And I think that it's going to get overshadowed by an upcoming interview that I have.

Well, I thought that that was interesting and let's head inside because it's cold out here. Uh. I love it though. I do love the snow. I can't complain about this at all. We're finally getting a real winter, and the other day I saw the guys, uh, it's finally, I'm pointing out that way. Like you can see there's a lake that way, that way.

Uh, and, uh, the guys have started to take out the ice racing bikes and, uh, has studded tires and all that, and are basically doing ice racing, which was super fun to go past one of the lakes around here and see people going, oh, I love it. It makes me so happy. All right, let's head inside.

Annick: It's cold out there. okay, so Mark had told me that there was going to be this interview. He didn't say who it was, and I was on a long drive, so I was listening to it and he interviewed FortNine.

And I have to say, this episode of Driven to Ride is fantastic. I thought the Barber Museum one was really good. I think you're going to love the [00:06:00] Barber Museum one and also this FortNine one. He went to Vancouver and interviewed Ryan F nine, Connor, who is the co-host, and Edwin, who is the cinematographer who made the movie Yalla Habibi.

I listened to this interview and it's one of those things where I, you know, like I. It's the middle winter, obviously, 'cause we're just outside. But like, what do you do during the winter? Like you can wrench on the bikes. You know, there's, there's always something to do, but we're not riding. So there's all these night hours where it gets dark at 4:30pm still.

What are you gonna do? Well, it's fun to listen to and watch motorcycle stuff because it gets you super psyched for the season. and I listened to this interview and I got so excited. I have not, at the point that I had watched the interview, I, or I'm sorry, at the point that I had listened to the interview, I had not yet watched the movie, but the interview made me super pumped to watch the movie because

listening to the behind the scenes with Ryan, Connor and Edwin, it sets the stage for what this adventure was going to be like. Now, I will say this, there are spoilers in the podcast, so if you do not want the end of the movie to be ruined for you, watch the movie first and don't watch, don't listen to the podcast until afterwards.

Uh, I was okay with knowing what the outcome, the ultimate outcome would be. it was just a great interview. sometimes you're like, wow, these people really nailed it. But I think that the podcast from my perspective when I listened to it, is that it really just kind of showed everybody's real personalities and what it took to have an undertaking like this.

The premise of the movie is that they are trying to break a world record of circumnavigating the world within just say about 20 days.

So the question is, is it worth watching, right? I've hyped you up now, we know FortNine puts out really good videos, excellent motorcycle content. They have 2.5 million subscribers. They're the real deal. They know what they're talking about, their content's engaging, but like, does that scale up into a movie? And I'm here to say, yes, it is absolutely worth watching.

Were you surprised by that answer? I don't know. Probably not. But I, I am gonna say that what I loved about it is really the sense of adventure It is super fun. It's a great watch. They did an excellent job filming it, which I have to say that in a round the world trip where you are on a time clock to beat a record, I cannot imagine that it was easy at all to make this happen.

I don't wanna give, much away, but one thing I found out from the interview, and, and it's not, it's not a spoiler because they say in all the promos and stuff like that, is they rode Ducatis around the world and Ryan F nine, who's the main guy, he said that, you know, he's basically bike agnostic and I could totally relate to that.

The funny thing was that they asked all these different manufacturers, I mean these guys are hooked up, we're talking hooked up, okay? And most of the manufacturers, in fact, all the other manufacturers said, no, we, we can't support you doing this. And Ducati was the only manufacturer that was like, yes, we love a race, let's go.

And they helped coordinate to make this happen, which. I'm sure was no small feat, so hats off to Ducati and like way to win the race of just getting your name in front of everybody and showing what the motorcycles are capable of. The other thing that I found that was really interesting and they touch on it in the interview.

You see it in the movie, but it's one of the questions what gear did you wear? And they're super honest in that they didn't really wear anything fancy gear wise now. Now mind you, they work for a company that sells gear and they just basically wore what they. Had nothing fussy. You know, there's, I can see like in there, there's a couple of Klim and I think that there's like some Alpinestars in there, but they have in one shot.

I mean, he's not even wearing motorcycle boots. He's wearing a, they, they look like Red Wings. I thought that that was really interesting because you want to do a world trip and I love gear. So like I, I would've gone down the deep hole of trying to get the best gear and figure all that out. Uh, so I think it's really funny that they did this trip in nothing fancy.

And honestly, it looks like their helmets are a little bit old. So I also thought that, thought that that was funny and they made it work. Right? And it kind of goes back to sometimes you just don't need fancy stuff to have an adventure. I think we're a little bit jaded in that, of trying to get the newest and best.

So I thought that that was really cool that they were transparent about that because again, they work for a company that sells gear and yet they chose not to invest in anything fancy.

Annick: I finished filming and then there was, something I forgot that I also wanted to say, which is, are there any negatives in the movie and one thing that I saw in the comments section below the trailer, on Fort nine was a lot of foreign people had said that they had a hard time hearing or understanding what was being said in certain parts of the movie.

I get that because doing any of this video work, it's really hard to get sound right. And they were capturing audio basically through, the helmets and, Being a little bit separated from say, the camera and such like that. So there are parts where it's a little bit unclear or muffled, but I give them a pass on that because I just, I know, personally firsthand how hard it is to capture that.

But if English is not your first language, I suspect because enough people in the comment section were suggesting that there be subtitles that I would, you know. I wouldn't be surprised if at some point they come out with a version that has subtitles, which I do think would help people who perhaps English is not their first language.

Otherwise, besides that, I think that, uh, because of the visuals and the excitement of the movie, you will let that pass

back to everything else I was saying.

Annick: Lastly, the thing that I enjoyed about watching this is it's the middle of the winter, the days are short. we could be wrenching in the shop, And catching up on things that we should be doing, motorcycle, maintenance wise. It's also a slower time of year It's after the holidays, everybody's food coma out and deciding whether or not they're gonna do New Year's resolutions.

There's this in-between time, January to March, especially here in the Northeast where the riding is sketchy if you are gonna go out or not. what else are you gonna do to inspire yourself? And I feel like. This movie is super inspiring. It's like when I watched the Baja 1000 movie. I don't know if you guys remember that, but, uh, it was released years ago, probably early two thousands.

they show this scene where Mouse, who's one of the racers, is completely delirious from riding all day. And he gets off the bike and he basically doesn't even really know where he is. That true sense of capturing what it's like to do something that is so off the beaten track. And also so not part of our daily lives is very fun.

And like I said, very inspiring. So I think that watching a movie like this in the off season is even better because it's going to make you start thinking about okay, what do I wanna do this year? what? Fun adventure do I want to do. And believe me, it does not need to be this crazy trying to break a world record.

Although if it is, I think that's super impressive and reach out to me 'cause we'll do an interview. Uh, or if it's just a small adventure of leaving the house and doing a overnight somewhere. Or deciding to have an adventure in building a new bike or, what whatever it might be. I think that this movie will inspire you to do something.

I just wanna say hats off to the FortNine team because you guys killed it. Very entertaining, very fun. I, I'm never disappointed by their videos. There's, it's obvious that there's so much thought that goes into creating any of their content.

, And also the fact that they have a full-time filmmaker. It just really elevates these videos and movies a whole nother level. And the reason why I initially had said . Is it worth watching? You have to pay for it and it's 9 99 US dollars.

Totally worth it. , And you're not renting it, you when you pay the 9 99, you are actually buying it and you can watch it as many times as you want. I think this would be super fun that if you do a bike night or you have any gatherings with your friends, this would be a fun, awesome movie to show. 

I'm gonna have all the links in the show notes to the various content that I refer to, both with FortNine and with Driven To Ride. Follow them both.

I love sharing stuff that inspires me or I'm totally into motorcycle wise because like I said, they were not on my radar and that is crazy. I know, but this is how the internet works.

So if there is some kind of motorcycle content that you love. Throw it down in the show notes and let's share so that we can kind of create this web of people sharing, you know, what they like watching, who they're into, and help promote some of these other channels and content creators out there.

Uh, and if you even wanna promote yourself, I don't have a problem with that. So go right ahead. If you wanna be like, I've got a great YouTube channel and I got five subscribers, I would love to have more. Put it in the show notes. All right. We'll check you out.

I also wanna bring up that I am leaving within 24 hours to fly out to California to go to the AIM Expo. That is the motorcycle dealership show. If there is anything, product, gear, or motorcycle wise that you would like me to cover, also let me know in the show notes or DM me because I love a mission and it'll be, I'm gonna be there underneath the media pass.

So that means that I'm going to get the first look at the products with the manufacturers, and I obviously love that. But I would also like to ask some questions that you guys wanna know because sharing is caring people, and let's make this a year of sharing our favorite motorcycle content creators and also getting psyched for the upcoming season. And now if you are in an area where you can ride year long hats off my friends. Uh, but I'm keeping this one on because it's a wee bit chilly in the shop.

If you like what you heard today and you would like to support the show, we always appreciate that and you can buy me a, an oil change at buy me a coffee.

Until next time, ride Smart Ciao.

* OUTRO *