Taking a crash course in needless speed
It’s the fast and the spurious in this video game made fl esh that revels in vehicular carnage
It’s not far into the 3D video game made flesh called Need For Speed — a car chase that answers the age- old question, “What would it be like to stick your head into a 900- horsepower engine for 130 minutes?” — when you realize what you’re in for.
It comes during a race along the streets of little Mount Kisco, N. Y., as high- performance cars speed along the town roads and nearby highways, in and out of the wrong lanes, squealing around corners with all the excitement of, well, of cars going fast. Suddenly, a homeless man appears pushing a shopping cart. One of the cars smashes into the cart, knocking his belongings over the street. Then they all speed off.
And the homeless guy? Just another forgotten victim of the need for speed: Later, innocent bystanders, children in a school bus and many policemen will be variously endangered, pushed into accidents or sent flying bumper over exhaust system as the hotshots race their multimillion- dollar cars through crowded cities or along busy highways. We’re meant to root for them and ignore the carnage: It’s the fast and the spurious.
There’s a plot of sorts. Bluecollar mechanic Tobey Marshall ( Aaron Paul) agrees to work with local racing star Dino Brewster ( Dominic Cooper). He’ll fix up Dino’s $ 2.7- million Shelby Mustang in return for a share of the profits. But as these things tend to do, it turns into a race for all the money, with the rivals driving gull- wing Ageras — Need for Speed is a primer in automobiles you’ve never heard of and can’t afford — in a race that results in a death.
Tobey is innocent of any wrongdoing — except for reckless endangerment, of course — but he goes to jail, and when he comes out he vows revenge. How? Another race, of course. He asks lovely Julia ( Imogen Poots), who buys cars for millionaire clients, to lend him the Mustang and he’ll drive across the U. S. to take on Dino in an illegal road race in California. She says yes, because who wouldn’t lend a $ 2.7- million car to an ex- con for a cross- country jaunt?
This results in yet another race to get to California in time to register in time for the next race. That’s a lot of revolutions per minute, and director Scott Waugh, a former stuntman, chops it all together in high, or at least noisy, style, with a series of preposterous set pieces: cars that leap over the median, plus a few lanes of traffic, to avoid the cops; cars that are refuelled even as they race down the highway; cars that are lifted out of danger by helicopters flown by soldiers — guys who have access to all manner of airplanes from the co- operative U. S. military — and carried right over cliffs. If Thelma and Louise had only known.
The stunts in Need for Speed are real: No computer pixels were harmed in the making of this film. It’s the people who are fake. Tobey and Dino are pretty well glum and glummer and Paul, best known as Jesse on Breaking Bad, lacks the movie star charisma to make him interesting enough to care about. Frankly, the Mustang has more personality.
Poots is an interesting choice, though: She always seems better than her material, and you get a feeling she’s slumming even as she straps on her seatbelt and takes the wheel for a sequence in which the anonymous driver of a Hummer is punished for his vehicle choice by being forced off the road and into what looks like a fatal spin. Loser.
Michael Keaton also pops up as Monarch, a shadowy figure who organizes the big road race — another absurd collage of multimilliondollar vehicles being wrecked — and narrates it in streams of exposition, in case we can’t follow the plot. He also provides the presiding ethos of Need for Speed: “Racers should race,” he says as we watch pursuing police cars bursting into flames. “Cops should eat doughnuts.” And video games should stay at home.