The Movie Nut




 

 

You can respect a filmmaker who knows exactly what he’s got and doesn’t try to make it anything more. And what stuntmanturned director Scott Waugh has here is an exciting street racing movie based on the most successful video game racing franchise ever.

Early stunts are implausible, later stunts are impossible, but the whole thing becomes infectious. If you downshift your expectations and just buckle in for the ride, “Need for Speed” is hands-sweating, heart-racing, popcorn-munching fun.

And the only thing more preposterous than some of the stunts is the plot itself.

Tobey Marshall (Paul) is a racing legend in Mt. Kisco, N.Y., where he and his garage buddies hang around racing and restoring cars. But they need money to stay in business, so when local bad boy Dino (Cooper) offers them $500,000 to restore a Shelby Mustang, they take the job.

When exotic car dealer Julia Maddon (Poots) facilitates the sale of the finished car to a wealthy Brit, Dino proposes a race for all the chips. There’s a crash and a fire and Tobey’s friend is killed. Dino leaves the scene before the cops arrive; Tobey spends time in prison for manslaughter.

The rest of the movie is about Tobey’s revenge and redemption.

That will require driving from Mt. Kisco to San Francisco with Julia along for the ride. It will involve Tobey’s buddy Benny (Mescudi) hijacking small planes to fly reconnaissance—and sometimes air rescue.

It will include a goofy nude sequence in Detroit and a pileup of homages to better racing movies of the past.

The goal is for Tobey to enter the super-secret high-stakes De Leon, a race involving Dino and sponsored by the reclusive Monarch ( Michael Keaton). The winner gets everyone’s cars.

Any 10-year old with a game controller knows how it all ends.

There are four races in this movie and every character, location, line of dialogue and other element is in here because it leads into or out of—or is part of—a race.

Director Waugh’s previous effort was “Act of Valor,” the Navy SEAL movie using live ammunition, so he’s comfortable handling dangerous weapons. Here, the weapons are powerful cars, and he lets his characters aim and fire them indiscriminately, often without a moral compass.

But where the typical race movie builds excitement by including multiple in-car closeups, here cinematographer Shane Hurlbut focuses essentially on three angles: the driver’s face, the view from the front window and the cars dueling on the road—and it all works.

The races are impressively staged and edited, with few sequences computer- created. What you see littering the road is largely what happened; the vast majority of names in the end credits belong to drivers and stunt drivers.

Tow trucks must have had their best year ever on the roads where this was filmed.

It’s fortunate that racing takes up so much of the movie because everything else is out of gas. Character development is missing, humor falls flat, dialogue is gear-grindingly terrible. A sample: “You learn a lot about a person when she’s been hit by a truck.”

Given the thin story, the acting is as good as it needs to be.

Paul tries for Steve McQueenlike toughness from “Bullitt” and ends up with Keanu Reeves-like stiffness from “Speed.” Poots is exceptionally phony trying to pretend she knows cars, but she does develop an easy chemistry with Paul as the movie progresses.

Tobey’s garage friends are interchangeable; Benny’s exploits are incomprehensible. As the evil Dino, Cooper’s character never gets out of first gear.

Keaton acts as if he’s popping his clutch; he bounces, fishtails, spews his lines like an overcaffeinated nitwit, occasionally sneaking a peek at the camera. His most essential job is to create the movie’s ending from voiceover narration.

He also tells the movie’s biggest lie: “This ain’t just about the racing,” he says. But of course it is. Because it’s entertaining and exciting only as long as everyone stays in their cars.


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