Review of Faster (2010) by Daniel K — 25 Aug 2011

3: Spoiler alert: Don't read this review if you plan on seeing the film and care about having plot elements revealed to you. This picture really surprised me. I tend to like revenge pictures, such as Taken or Man on Fire, but I wasn't expecting this to be quite so entertaining.

What struck me most was the purity of the film. It is straight action, at least through the first two acts, with hardly a complication. It is relentless in its drive forward, just as the "Driver" character, again a reflection of the simple and pure energy of the film, is a rock of muscle with a sole purpose in life: revenge.

I felt like to picture started t grow overly complicated in the third act when it began to draw in religious elements and the notion of forgiveness, but these turned out to be important to the overall arc.

Just as the "Driver" tells the son of a man he murdered that revenge is a dark and lonely path (I'm paraphrasing), in the end we realize that he now has nowhere to go. His mission, and hence his life are effectively over.

His path of destruction has gained him little if anything. The other thing that struck me about the film, is the fact that I didn't realize the "Cop" character was the mastermind until it was revealed in the third act.

All of the pieces necessary to make this connection were blindingly present, but I would argue because of the ideological purity of the film, I failed to put two and two together. It was as if predicting this was irrelevant to my enjoyment of the film, and it was.

I think this one was needlessly derided by the critics as I found much to admire. The Rock's turn as "Driver" isn't an monumental as Schwarzenegger's in T2, but it is a lesser version of it.

he was made to embody this monosyllabic and steroidal role.