Directed by: Scott Waugh
Starring: Aaron Paul, Dominic Cooper, Imogen Poots
Rated PG-13, 130 minutes
Scott Waugh’s last name looks like a cartoonish cry of despair, the sort of exclamation you’d find Charlie Brown wailing from the pitcher’s mound. How very fitting for such a name to be attached to what I think might be the most laughably bad movie I’ve seen in the three and a half years I’ve been writing these reviews. I intend to have fun writing this one.
Let’s be clear, though – “laughably bad” isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Once I had gotten into the world of “Need for Speed,” I found myself smiling. And I continued smiling and stifling laughter for the remainder of the movie. So there’s that, at least!
The video game adaptation centers around one Toby Marshall (Aaron Paul, TV’s “Breaking Bad”), an upstate New York car mechanic who races beautiful cars at night and always wins because he’s our protagonist. He and his friends run a body shop and live a splendid car-centered life. But then an old and sinister acquaintance reappears: Dino Brewster (what a name!). After some ego-bruising, Dino (Dominic Cooper, “The Devil’s Double”) brutally kills one of Toby’s friends with an unsportsmanlike tactic in a street race. To top it off, Dino then frames Toby for the murder.
Two years later, Toby is out of jail and ready to avenge his friend. How does he intend to do that, you ask? Simple: he’ll take a legendary Mustang to California to compete in a race against Dino and win. But he only has two days until the race, and a country to cross by car. Oh, and he has to bring along the car’s owner, Julia Maddon (Imogen Poots, “28 Weeks Later”). Also, for what it’s worth, the police don’t much like all this street racing business.
Now, it would have been easy to take a plot like this and make “Need for Speed” into a bad movie. However, Waugh (“Act of Valor”) and writer George Gatins (“She’s Out of My League”) and really the entire cast and crew put in that extra little something, and now this movie is so bad that it’s actually fun to watch.
Lines get delivered in ways that would make you think these actors have never taken part in regular conversation. Shots linger for way too long and are randomly close up at times. A mysterious car guru called “The Monarch” runs a seemingly endless online video/radio show with an active and always-correct public forum. One character quits his job by taking off all his clothes in the office and streaking all the way to the car.
But hey, credit where credit’s due, right? No, the characters never eat, but in one scene, they talk about it, at least! Before they get distracted by cars, anyway. Also, characters sleep! And Imogen Poots’s Julia is likable, albeit inconsistent and relegated to a backseat driver alongside Aaron Paul, even though she claims numerous times that the boys ought to be ashamed for underestimating her (now that’s a progressive script!). Paul, for his part, is uncanny as a stoic and bitter hero who sticks to his morals even if it chews him up inside. What a mensch.
Bonus points! To Aaron Paul for always looking like he’s about to cry; to Imogen Poots’s so-British-it-hurts accent (which another character even addresses at one point); to Dominic Cooper, for playing a character as evil as Dino Brewster and almost selling it; to the amazing internet connections that allow our heroes to upload videos to the Monarch’s forum lickety-split (“Need for Speed,” indeed!); to the sound designer who painstakingly logged about a thousand screeching tire sound effects, just so we could be annoyed every time we hear one; and to whoever thought to insert a shot of a never-before-mentioned tattoo of Toby’s dead friend’s name on his wrist at a climactic moment. And an honorable mention to Scott Mescudi (better known as the rapper Kid Cudi) for his totally misguided foray into comic relief.
If you’re wondering: no, I can’t in good conscience recommend this movie to you. But – if I may use a relevant metaphor here – if we think of a movie as a car, and all of its elements as different car parts, “Need for Speed” may not be a beautiful silver Mustang, but it’s unlike any car you’ve seen. Say, a rusted ’86 Pontiac with fire decals and only spare tires left. And that’s got its charm, right?
Originally published in The Harvard Press on 3/21/14.