Review of Need for Speed (2014) by Bradley F — 31 Aug 2014

Almost everything in Need For Speed feels very forced and completely forgettable. This film is going to be hard to review not because it's god awful because it's just a bland movie trying very hard to be a Fast and Furious movie. Considering this movie is based off a video game, that is the first red flag. Let's take a look at "Need For Speed".

Toby Marshall (Aaron Paul) is of course a race car driver. He does a lot of illegal race in this small town (who knows where it is?) with his idiotic friends. Toby somehow gets framed for manslaughter and goes on this revenge race across the country to get into another race to save his mechanic business. Yeah this plot sounds like total bullshit to me. Remember how I said almost everything in this movie is forced? Well the plot is one of those things. I know I'm suppose to save the whole "worse thing about this movie" till last but I might as well get it out of the way here. The only thing that was important to the makers of this film was the Racing, car crashes and whatever else having to do with cars. The "story" of Need For Speed just isn't that interesting. Every single plot device feels very contrived and fake. It really does feel like watching a video game than actual motion picture and really that's the main reason Need For Speed fails.

Of course, a forced story also comes with forced and boring characters. Yeah every single character in this movie is as flat and as interesting as driftwood at sea. In fact I pretty much grew to hate most of them because these characters were annoying to listen to. I didn't care about anyone in this movie, even Toby himself. Both the character and Aaron Paul's performance aren't really good at all. He's mainly just trying to be a race car driver version of Batman. He's mianly a stiff humorless jerk the entire film. Everybody else in the cast are clearly trying their hardest, but it's not enough to make any of their characters interesting or 3 dimensional.

The only good thing about Need For Speed is the action scenes. The racing is quite exciting and those scenes are the only things in the film that feel real. I mean they should be there's supposedly no CGI when it comes to the Races and stunts. But again all the action in the world can't make this movie interesting and it doesn't hide the fact that this film is mainly style over substance. So even the good stuff in this film suffers a bit.

Need For Speed isn't the worst movie of the year, I have seen far worse in 2014. Still, the movie is just very... loud and dumb. The story is weak, the characters are 1 dimensional, the main character is freaking boring and of course the film as a whole is just filler until the next Car Chase.