Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Need for Speed


I have always thought that video game movies should be easier to make than comic book movies, but they fail at recreating the experience all the time. Look at the main selection of video game movies out; first there’s Resident Evil, a movie where all they did was take a concept and messed it up severely by adding a whole team of people instead of keeping it a single player experience. Then there is Hitman , a game about a lone assassin, but a movie about an assassin that becomes a knight in shining armor. I could go on about Max Payne and Doom but you get the idea, I will say that Doom had that one sequence that was very game like, when they went into first person shooter mode, that was fun but very unnecessary. I am not even going to touch on the atrocities of Uwe Boll.

These types of games (racing) should be the easiest to make into a movie, and let me tell you it was. Now I haven’t played the newest Need for Speed games, but this was very reminiscent of Hot Pursuit, one of my favorite versions of the Need for Speed series. From the cars they used, to the locations they picked, even down to the police radio talk to the checkpoints in the race, the last half hour of this movie was Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit.


Toby Marshall, son of a late great racing legend, makes a deal with a very old rival, Dino, to build a car for him to sell, so that Toby can save his father’s garage. But where egos and cars are involved there is always a race. Dino challenges Toby to either win Dino's share of the profit or lose his, Toby accepts, but his friend also talks his way into the race, against Toby’s warnings. A heart pounding race ensues where Dino is in the lead until they almost cause a huge accident on the freeway where Toby takes the lead, in the last stretch of the race in fear of losing going over 200mph, Dino taps Pete’s bumper and causes Pete’s car to flip and turn in to a big ball of flame hurtling down the highway and off a bridge. Stopping to go back and try to save his friend from a fully engulfed car Toby gets arrested and accused of Pete’s death, while Dino runs and creates an alibi.

2 years later Toby gets out of jail, looking for vengeance only the way a racer can, calls in a favor and starts a cross country sprint to get from New York to California in less than 48 hours, to make it to the De Leon, a special race where its winner takes all. Upon learning of this development Dino places a bounty on Toby to keep him from the race, but you can’t stop vengeance.


Now on the other side, comparing this movie to the Fast and Furious series. FF has a more developed story, not just because they’ve had 6 movies to do it, but each movie has more story to it than this did, but I am not saying that is a bad thing. For being a video game movie this movie did exactly what was necessary, it came up with the plot of a game and had you watch it instead of play it, it would be so easy to go into the game and recreate every scene, minus the cut scene character development segments. This movie has also delivered in a way that the FF series hasn’t, this movie married the racing aspect to the acting segment almost flawlessly. The other thing that was great about this movie was you learned all about the back story in about the first 5 minutes so it could spend most of the movie moving forward instead of dragging its feet in the past.

I highly recommend that you see this in theaters, the only downside I have with the movie is that it wasn’t presented in IMAX. I would also like to thank the script writer and director for not going heavy handed on the little love story that was going on in the movie, they gave it as much as was needed and didn’t make it the center point of the story when it started.




I give this a 4 out of 5

Written by Jeff Potts

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