The sheer quality (and occasional creativity) of the stunt work makes the film mostly worth seeing on its own for those so inclined. The film is filled long and wide shots of real stunt drivers doing pretty impressive things behind the wheel of any number of very nice cars. In terms of "cars doing cool stuff", you will absolutely get your money's worth. Dakota Johnson has a nothing role and makes you see why she was likely thrilled to get a real role to play in Fifty Shades of Grey. But most people won't go to see Need For Speed for the character work and narrative. Most of the supporting characters are pretty broad, while Poots almost makes her character more than just "the girl" by sheer force of will even as the film keeps undermining her. I could do with a little less lechery and pointlessly stupid humor (even if much of it is confined to a single stupid city-set sequence in the second act), but them's the brakes. It's indicative of the film's unwillingness to trust its audience to connect the dots even when those dots are the size of an anvil. Pardon the obscure reference, but if you remember the hilariously ham-fisted expositional news cast that kicks off the action finale of Spider-Man 3, you'll have a good idea of how 90% of Keaton's dialogue plays out, especially in the third act. It's not his fault really, as his street racing DJ is forced to deliver hilariously on the nose exposition and character explanation as well as generic clichés. In one's lifetime as a critic, among the sentences you're never expecting to write are "Michael Keaton is terrible and should have been cut from the movie". Will Toby get to California in time to enter the race? Will he be able to at long-last prove that Dominick Cooper's Dino Brewster was actually responsible for the fatal drag race that kick started the plot? Will Michael Keaton stop talking down to the audience with spoon-fed exposition? For reasons not worth explaining here, our hero spends the second act of the film in a cross-country trip in a refurbished mustang and also alongside Imogen Poots, who has a stake in the car and thus demands to come along. Two years later, he's out of prison exactly in time for a secret and potentially lucrative street race. The surprisingly complicated plot involves a blue-collar mechanic (Aaron Paul) who pisses away a $675,000 payday for himself and his colleagues on what amounts to a penis-measuring street race and then takes the fall when said street race ends in fiery tragedy. In this era of willfully bad movies and intentional would-be camp "classics", there is something almost refreshing about the seemingly unintentional and thus completely sincerity awfulness of Need For Speed. If you can ignore or embrace how cartoonish and self-sabotaging the characters are and how moronic the screenplay is, there is fun to be had to this old-school 1970's-style throwback. As it is, the picture succeeds purely on its technical merits, offering some frankly terrific car racing and car chasing footage inside a somewhat paint-by-numbers story line that insults our intelligence at every opportunity. If Walt Disney's Need For Speed (produced by DreamWorks, distributed by Walt Disney) were 15% less overtly dumb and 15% less pandering to the stereotypical boy audience, it might have been a completely enjoyable B-movie romp. It's an unusual Disney-distributed release (produced by DreamWorks, natch) in that it wasn't insanely expensive nor either a Marvel film or an animated project, so it's the closest thing we're going to get to a Disney "B-movie" for a long time. That the film is being converted to 3D at the last minute could be seen as a sign of desperation or merely a concession to the overseas marketplace (I saw the film in 2D). Expect an opening weekend of over/under $20 million with the hopes that word-of-mouth over the film's stunt work and relatively kid-friendly tone (PG-13 rating aside, this is pure PG-material) will get the film to $60m in the states and that overseas can match or double that number. Breaking Bad's Aaron Paul is getting his crack at being a would-be leading man, with $66 million in production cost and however much more in marketing being spent towards these goals. The film's marketing campaign has been pretty pervasive, with a strong Super Bowl spot and trailers that highlight the film's practical car racing work. As for the movie, Walt Disney is clearly hoping for a franchise of sorts, something to appeal to the demographics that made the first Fast & The Furious a hit as well as those who regularly play the game on which it's based. Need For Speed is a racing game that, uh, well, ask Paul Tossi and Erik Kain why it's special and/or stands out among the other racing games. This week's such entry is based on a popular street racing video game.
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