The car chase has been a staple of Hollywood movies almost since the inception of film but they really took off when 1968’s
Bullitt
hit theatres and since then directors have tried to make their chases
even more thrilling. Now back then this meant hiring incredibly gifted
stunt drivers and coordinators to pull of some really dangerous stuff
but now with the aid of CGI and better compositing you can have your
hero do any kind of stunt in a car without endangering anyone. I am of
course fine with drivers not risking their lives just to make a movie
but something has certainly been lost from the heyday of car movies.
Sure today’s films still employee talented stunt teams but the results
just don’t give you that same visceral thrill you got when watching
something like
The French Connection or
The Road Warrior.
Apparently this is today’s car culture.
Enter director
Scott Waugh
who has made the transition from stunt man to director following in the
steps of such legendary stuntmen as Hal Needham who gave us
Smokey and the Bandit and
Cannonball Run, but sadly though this
Need for Speed relies more on real drivers, and not as much CGI enhancements as some films, it still isn’t even as good as
Cannonball Run 2.
Lack of Burt Reynolds is your first problem.
This movie is of coursed based on a video game which has most movie
audiences assuming it’s going to be crap right out of the gate, but
being it is basically just a “car chase” movie all one has to do is slap
on a simple plot, maybe a love interest and throw in a good villain to
at least make an entertaining film. Scott Waugh fails at this in every
way imaginable.
“I really miss Breaking Bad.”
Tobey Marshall (
Aaron Paul)
is a local gearhead god with a small group friends that work in his
late father’s garage but when the bank threatens to foreclose he must
make a deal with Dino Brewster (
Dominic Cooper)
an old nemesis from his past who escaped the small town to become a
professional race car driver, and he also stole Tobey’s girl. We are
told that be almost everyone that Tobey is the better driver but we
never get an explanation as to why Dino went on to fame and fortune
while Tobey stayed home to remain poor.
“I’m an evil race car driver because…damn, I got nothin.”
Tobey takes a job from Dino that consists of him and his team
rebuilding a rare Ford Shelby Mustang which could sell as high as 3
million, but whatever they get Tobey will receive 25%. This is great
until upon selling the car Dino and Tobey engage in a street race to
finally settle who the better driver is with each of their shares from
the sale as stakes. This clearly establishes to us that our hero is a
moron. And because this movie need more drama than bank foreclosures and
boyhood feuds one of Tobey’s younger groupies joins in on the race and
is killed when Dino bumps his back wheel, sending his car flying off a
bridge. Dino flees the scene but Tobey stays and ends up going to jail.
Also no one of course believes him when he claims that Dino was there
and responsible for the poor kids death. To add even more drama the dead
kid is the little brother of the girlfriend that Dino stole from Tobey.
If you think you need this much set-up for your silly car chase movie
you’ve seriously misjudged your audience.
Hold L2 and R2 while hitting X.
Two years later and Tobey is released from on parole and decides to
enter this super-exclusive and very illegal car race, but of course he
needs a car so he borrows the incredibly expensive and rare Mustang
because millionaires are known for lending out their expensive toys to
ex-cons that were incarcerated for vehicular manslaughter. There is a
catch though he must take along Julia Maddon (
Imogen Poots)
who is the millionaire’s aide or something. She is of course the films
love interest but her an Aaron Paul have about zero chemistry.
“I’m British and that is my sole defining characteristic.”
The only way to find out where this super-secret race will be held is
to make their way across country from New York to San Francisco in two
days. Another wrinkle is that to the race is invitation only so Tobey
must draw attention to himself by starting a continent spanning police
chase so that maybe the race founder and racing legend Monarch (
Michael Keaton)
will be impressed. This kind of movie is of course going to require
some suspension of disbelief but to expect the viewer to buy that a
driver, even an awesome one, can evade the police for two straight days
is bloody insulting. Watch any YouTube video of a police chase and
you’ll notice that once air support is engaged by the authorities the
fleeing driver is as good as caught, now expand that to a chase across
several states and the strains of credulity snap.
At one point they are airlifted to escape Dino’s bounty hunters.
That level of stupidity aside there was an element of this movie that
I found even more egregious, after making all the way across country in
this amazing car it gets totalled by one Dino’s goons. So the car that
our leads have tooling around in for the bulk of this movie is not going
to be in the big race, which is some poor ass screenwriting, my
friends. Tobey ends up driving the car that Dino used to kill his
girlfriend’s brother. Yes, this movies villain stored the one piece of
evidence against him in a garage halfway across the country, and kept
photographic proof of the car’s existence and his guilt on his computer
under a file named “personal” so that his girlfriend could discover it
and hand it over to Tobey to drive in this stupid race, opposed to say
giving it to the police so they could arrest her brother’s murderer.
This is one vastly moronic movie.
Question: The race is
between seven drivers and the winner gets all the pink slips of the
opposing cars, but at the end of the race all six other cars are mostly
totaled and the winner gets carted off to jail. What kind of an idiot
would ever enter that race?
“We’ll settle this behind the wheel.”
That is actual dialogue from this movie that someone got paid to
write and kind of sums up the problem with this film. A thin premise
over burdened by needless complications compounded by some of the worst
acting this side of an Ed Wood film.
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