It’s only by sheer luck that Marshall, who gets arrested for Pete’s death and spends two years behind bars, doesn’t pick up several counts of vehicular manslaughter while setting out to avenge his friend’s murder and clear his name of – well, vehicular manslaughter. As expected, his demise is perpetrated by Brewster in an act that might be equated to a pre-schooler getting jealous over a toy at the playground (though the character quickly develops into some sort of sinister mastermind). It’s all about the money – $3 million, to be precise – and testosterone gets everyone in trouble, including Tobey’s protégé Pete (Harrison Gilbertson, “Haunt”), who might as well be wearing a shirt that says, “My impending death will reignite a decade-old rivalry between these two bozos”. Recent history has shown that when you get a career stuntman in the director’s chair, in this case Scott Waugh, who made 2012’s divisive but unquestionably one-of-a-kind war film “Act of Valor” (the cast was comprised of actual active-duty Navy SEALs), you tend to wind up with a movie driven by practical special effects rather than a barrage of CGI.Īnd that’s exactly what saves “Need For Speed” from being total garbage – the palpable sense that cars are actually crashing, jumping, spinning and skidding through the streets, even when most of the events transpiring on-screen seem virtually impossible. Being saddled with such nauseatingly dull dialogue and some terribly annoying characters, however, Waugh’s technical prowess and hands-on technique are all but wasted on a film that is mostly a chore to watch.Īaron Paul plays gifted small town auto mechanic and local street racing legend Tobey Marshall, an otherwise regular guy who takes an offer he can’t refuse from wealthy ex-Indy racer Dino Brewster (Dominic Cooper, “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter”), which is to finish building the Mustang that was in mid-development when legendary auto designer Carroll Shelby died. In fact, some of the racing sequences are so exciting and well-choreographed that I was tempted to forgive some of the painful melodrama, inexplicably silly sidebars and almost complete absence of logic that makes up the story from brothers George and John Gatins. While you definitely need to put your brain on cruise control for “Need For Speed”, a two-plus hour test of patience for mindless characters who seem to think that they’re operating inside some sort of magic bubble and a script that seldom makes any sense, the filmmakers behind it are anything but inept when it comes to giving their target demographic exactly what they want – fast, exotic cars and plenty of big, spectacular crashes. And there’s plenty of other nonsense that you might expect from a racing movie adapted from a video game, if you expected much of anything from it in the first place. Hey, at least they get a good laugh out of it. In the film’s opening race, in which participants navigate the streets of a small upstate New York town at Indy car speeds, a homeless man gets his shopping cart blasted out from in front of him and is only spared because the writers wouldn’t want us to hate the film’s main protagonist (Aaron Paul of “Breaking Bad”), which we certainly would have if he’d splattered this already unfortunate soul all over the sidewalk. Lots of reckless behavior endangering the lives of civilians on the streets, all for the sake of winning a (very large) bet, culminating in a tragedy that spawns a revenge plot, more reckless behavior, and a cross-country race against time that puts countless more people in harm’s way. Lots of unattainably expensive vehicles being smashed, flipped, and propelled into the air.
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