Say what you will about the Fast & Furious series (you might want to say that they started off terrible and have gotten progressively worse) but those films at least seem to have a sense of their own ridiculousness. Need for Speed on the other hand covers much the same ground but does it while taking itself oh so very seriously.
As far as I’m aware there has yet to be a decent movie adapted from a video game. From Super Mario Brothers to Doom, they have all been disasters. The Need for Speed games are highly successful and a lot of fun, but they seem an odd choice for cinematic adaptation because they have no story at all. Adapting Tetris would make more sense.
The Need for Speed games consist solely of racing a variety of fancy cars in exotic locations with no attempt at any form of narrative to link the races together. That’s absolutely fine for a video game delivering meaningless thrills, but a film needs a little more substance. Even the most ardent petrol-head wouldn’t be willing to sit in a cinema and watch two-hours plus of cars racing around with no attempt to make it interesting or compelling in any way. Actually, come to think of it they probably would; that’s basically what Formula One and Nascar are.
Screenwriter George Gatins had the unenviable task of coming up with a story to fill the spaces between races and, perhaps unsurprisingly considering the source material, he’s gone down a very well-worn and clichéd road. Luckily the Need for Speed movie has an exceptionally gifted leading man who manages to keep it at least slightly interesting.
It’s a sad fact that Aaron Paul’s career has probably already peaked, but his performance in Breaking Bad was so unbelievably good that every part he plays for the rest of his life is going to be unfavourably compared to it. His incarnation of Jesse Pinkman’s gradual transformation from scuzzy comic relief to the tortured moral centre of the show was powerful enough that he could justifiably be compared to a young Marlon Brando.
Need for Speed is the first of hopefully many lead film roles for Paul and he gets to display his trademark intensity as brooding ex-con street racer Tobey Marshall and manages to make the cheesiest of dialogue sound heartfelt and convincing. If there was a typically bland leading man in the driving seat, a Sam Worthington or a Logan Lerman for example, the whole thing would be a non-starter but Paul is good enough that you want to know where the story will take him, even if you have figured it out ten minutes in.
The same can’t be said for his passenger. Imogen Poots has been impressive in many roles but she is outright irritating here. She plays an English buyer to a millionaire playboy who for convoluted reasons is forced to take a cross country journey with our hero on the way to the big important race. Her character is a confused combination of love interest and comic relief that seems to have walked off the set of Made in Chelsea, and the idea of being forced to take a long car journey with this woman is horrifying.
The biggest problem Need for Speed has is its awkward attempt to make what is essentially a disposable piece of popcorn entertainment feel epic and momentous. The filmmakers try to achieve this by having endless soap opera scenes of characters sombrely discussing redemption and destiny, when you just want them to shut up and get in their cars. It stands to reason that a film about illegal street racing in very fast cars should be fast-paced but Need for Speed is over two hours long, and when there’s no racing happening it drags along at a snail’s pace.
Luckily, when the races do get going they are pretty damn exciting. Early on in the film a scene from Bullitt is shown at a drive-in cinema, which seems to be director Scott Waugh laying down his intentions when it comes to the race scenes. Bullitt is a classic masterclass in car chase cinema and Waugh seems to have taken inspiration from it in his decision to rely on practical stunt-work. The Fast and the Furious series often depends on CGI to power its car chases which, ironically, make watching them feel like watching someone playing a racing game.
Need for Speed doesn’t rely on CGI, or if it does, it uses CGI as it should be used; sparingly and effectively to augment the real life action. The chases here feel real and thrilling and the only problem is there isn’t enough of them, or at least that the boring gaps between them are too long.
This Blu-Ray package is heaped with extras and, if you liked the film enough to want to see it again, could be a prized possession. To be honest though the extras are like the film in that they are geared towards people who are obsessed with cars those who consider Jeremy Clarkson a hero and aren’t overly concerned with climate change. If you’re like me however and find people whose entire lives revolve around cars to be incredibly tedious people then this is the kind of film you watch once, find intermittently entertaining and then forget about.
Overall Verdict: Some refreshingly CGI-free race scenes and a passionate performance from Aaron Paul prevent Need for Speed from being entirely uninteresting. But it’s still overlong, cliché-ridden and takes itself far too seriously and will only have lasting appeal to hardcore petrol-heads.
Special Features:
Ties that Bind featurette
The Circus is in Town – featurette
Monarch & Maverick outtakes
Deleted Scenes
Feature Audio commentary with director Scott Waugh and star Aaron Paul
Capturing Speed: Making an Authentic Car Movie
Need for Speed: Rivals Trailer
Reviewer: Adam Pidgeon