I wonder if anyone will even remember this movie a year after its release. Does Michael Keaton remember starring in this movie? After a while, I forgot he was in it.
It’s been many years since the first Need for Speed game came out and now someone finally pulled the lever and tried to convert a popular racing game franchise into a movie…After The Fast and the Furious movie unofficially did it more than 10 years prior and became a successful franchise in its own right.
So, if The Fast and the Furious already did this in the past, what is the official Need for Speed movie bringing to the table that hasn’t been brought before? As it turns out, white mediocrity.
I hope you didn’t have your hopes up for a real movie with an original story and developed characters. “Nah, I’m just here for the racing and destruction,” I hear you say. Well, then you will have to sit through a lot of unpleasant filler in-between the good parts. In fact, Need for Speed only becomes Need for Speed in the last 20 minutes or so, which features a number of iconic race cars pitted against one another in a fast race, with police trying to murder them using their cars (accurate to the game), and a TV screen with the map of the race and the participants, like the map you’d see in a game. You can just go watch that race on whatever video sharing platform is currently dominating your era, instead of watching the whole film. This is the recommended approach, as the first half of the movie is muddied with a dumb plot.
The main difference between Need for Speed and The Fast and The Furious is that the former appears to be aimed at a whiter audience. The accent is on supercars instead of the import scene and gone is the overwhelming amount of hip-hop or the posing culture. Furthermore, as much as I disliked The Fast and Furious movie, I must admit that its artistic value was much higher, and its cultural impact was astronomical. The Fast and The Furious is whiter, blander and lower quality.
Aaron Paul, who plays the main hero, made it into the spotlight after the show Braking Bad. This reviewer does not get his appeal, but whatever appeal that may be, in Need for Speed he is a most generic and boring good guy. Yes, the man can technically act, but the makers of this film haven’t given him anything to do with that ability.
Then there is a number of side characters. Rami Malek as one of our hero’s crew members is charming and entertaining when he gets his own scene. He clearly deserves a better movie than this. Then there is Michael Keaton as the underground race organizer, who chews the scenery so wonderfully that it is a shame that he does not get more screentime. The rest of the crew, especially the pair of boobs played by Julia Maddon, as the main hero’s secondary love interest, are pointless and a little annoying, frankly. Regardless of their personal appeal, the dialogue given to all of them is so lame that even Keaton has trouble selling it.
As for the story, it is so disjointed, bland, and full of illogical events that you will be begging for the movie to get to driving scenes as soon as possible. Adapting games to coherent movie plots has a long history of failure. Sometimes, it is due to the differences in structure between a typical game and a movie, but in the case of Need for Speed, the only required element was the illegal racing (the games have little to no story). The writers had the freedom to do anything with that concept, so the blame for the inferior product is on them.
The driving scenes look good, though. The scenes shot from first-person view are effective. Hollywood, please use these more often in chases in other movies. Unfortunately, every time the movie finally gets to the driving part, the story wrestles its way back in and really…slows…things…doooooown.
To be fair, considering that this is movie is a game adaptation, it is better than it could’ve been. There are real actors and real iconic racing cars. For some this is going to be a downside. After all, if it was a truly terrible film, we could have at least laughed at it. People could have made funny video reviews about it, ripping it apart. Instead, it is just an average movie with some cool cars.