When I heard that they were making Need For Speed, a film adaptation of a video game that’s little more than a racing simulator with no built in characters or storylines, I was incredulous. When I then heard that it was going to be the first big starring vehicle for Aaron Paul following his career-making run on TV’s Breaking Bad, my reaction to the project was downgraded from incredulous to skeptical. If Paul, who had reached a career crossroads where he likely had offers coming in from all corners of Hollywood, saw something in this project, then maybe there’s something to it? Maybe some ambitious screenwriter somewhere took a thin premise and nonetheless turned it into a screenplay worth getting excited about? Nope. Need For Speed is one of the most senseless, stupid, poorly written movies I’ve seen in a really long time.
When it comes to the story this movie tells, it turns out a dry racing simulation would have been preferable in almost every way. Instead, we get a melodramatic tale that sees Paul playing a down on his luck mechanic/street racer named Tobey who enters into an ill-advised race with an old rival (Dominic Cooper) that not only causes the death of his adopted little brother type (Harrison Gilbertson), but that also results in him serving two years in jail while Cooper’s character uses his connections to get off scot-free. Upon his release, Tobey decides to get revenge through an inexplicable plan that will see him racing across the country in order to get to San Francisco in time to join an underground race put on by an eccentric recluse (Michael Keaton). He intends to win the race, which would… somehow make things even between him and Cooper’s character? Cooper’s character, of course, doesn’t want this to happen, so he offers up a bounty to anyone who can hunt Tobey down and stop him from making it to the race on time. Oh, and also Imogen Poots is also along for the ride as Tobey’s passenger, because somewhere during the development process someone must have decided that the movie needed a romantic element.
It’s not really any surprise that Need For Speed is little more than a thin narrative framework meant to tie together a series of big car chase sequences, but what can’t help but come as a surprise is just how consistently the story fails to make any sense whatsoever, how the dialogue is so clunky and terrible that it often consists of random statements that don’t make any sense placed next to each other as conversation, how a story that should play as pure exploitation tries and fails so thoroughly and frequently to be high-drama, and how anyone anywhere thought that a film about car chases needed to clock in at two hours and ten minutes. What a tedious mess this movie is.
It should get some small credit because director Scott Waugh at least pieces the chase scenes together coherently, and he actually uses real cars instead of fake-looking CG ones that would have taken you out of the action, but that stuff doesn’t end up amounting to much. Not when the chases are so frequent that they ultimately become white noise, and not when everything around them is so bad that it makes you need to massage your temples out of frustration. Don’t even get me started on how we’re supposed to be rooting for a group of people who regularly street race in highly populated areas, causing death, injury, and property damage to countless innocents. Don’t ask me to relive how random the inclusion of Poots’ character is, and how the romantic subplot may be the most tacked on and useless in movie history. Please don’t ask me to expound on how the third act degenerates to the point where everything happening on the screen is simultaneously explained to us through Keaton narration, and how the things he’s explaining don’t even make any sense to anyone with the slightest sense of reality or cause and effect. I’ve spent far too much time thinking about this rock dumb movie already.
If you happen to be really into cars, then see Need For Speed when it comes out on home video. Fast-forward through all the talking parts and just watch the driving. If you’re planning on seeing this one because you’re a Paul fan thanks to Breaking Bad, you’d be much better off just skipping it and saving yourself the frustration. Instead, watch him in James Ponsoldt’s 2012 indie Smashed. It’s a project that’s infinitely more worthy of his talents, and it should do nicely to get you your Jesse Pinkman fix.
