Need for Speed

If you have ever played the game "Need for Speed", or at least watched someone play it, like me, you might have a pleasant feeling of déjà vu during the races, because it's a real ride, and besides, you are not on a circuit, and in the end, you will also get into nature quite nicely. Yeah, it's a pretty typical plot, but that ride can really be enjoyed. (15/08/2014)

The game “Need For Speed” is something I remember with fondness. I’d be hard pressed to forget it when the US developers keep making one sequel after another every year. Some of them are better, some of them worse. It was just a matter of time before this franchise would be turned into a movie and I must say that from the amount of bullshit we have been treated to during these races, the story the creators picked wasn’t so bad. I enjoyed the action scenes that felt a lot like playing the game. Those made me happy. On the other hand, the characters took some getting used to. Perhaps with the exception of Imogen Poots, who made me happy since the first moment she appeared. Aaron Paul, on the other hand, is a bit wet behind the ears and it took me about half an hour to accept the fact that he’s no Vin Diesel or Paul Walker. I also cringed during every scene with Dominic Cooper. Michael Keaton, however, managed to knock my socks off with how he was enjoying his character. Had it not been for the running time and contained less talking and more action, I would have rated it better. 131 minutes was too long for such a movie. (17/11/2014)

I have to say that this movie features great cars and some quite interesting racing with some pleasant locations, but that is about it, hence the two stars. The narrative is told in a strange way and it was not original - just some clichéd rivalry issue between two drivers and a quest for revenge for the ruined life of a friend. Unlike in The Fast and the Furious, I did not get on with the main male protagonist or his crew (the main female protagonist was not very sexy, either), so I was almost wishing for the cops to catch them already. I do not know if it was the stupid Czech dubbing or if the dialogues are this crazy in the original; however, the lines of those guys and the way they were communicating with each other left me with only the question “WTF?” and it was almost impossible to bear. Somehow I do not believe that guys in their twenties talk like I did when I was thirteen. If there were going to be another NFS, I would have liked a better story, a more charismatic main protagonist, a prettier girl, and edgy, relevant, and believable lines, not just a random load of supposedly funny lines meant to sound edgy to kids aged thirteen to fifteen. 3/10. (22/11/2014)

Instead of an exciting racing film, an everyday road movie arrived in movie theaters with the most common and predictable story of revenge and the most ordinary romantic plot. The chases and racing scenes do have energy, but everything else is hopelessly uninteresting. The characters lack charisma, the film lacks insight, tension and humor, and the creators' quest for realism is a clear step back after the last two parts of The Fast and the Furious series. Desperately dull and uncool. (10/03/2014)

By gamers, for gamers. Or, more precisely, by people who present themselves as gamers (because doing so is favourable with respect to marketing), for viewers who consider those people to be gamers (young men from poorer backgrounds without higher education, dreaming that they will pick up beautiful women thanks to their driving skills). Waugh’s film is possibly one of the most thorough video-game adaptations and thus, more than other game adaptations, lays bare the limits of trying to be maximally accommodating toward fans of the source material. The plot is of marginal importance and serves primarily as an unobtrusive (though necessary) basis for the action. However, the mediocre dialogue, overacting, infantile humour and formulaic situations are significantly more irritating on the big screen than in the cut-scenes of the game (though their purpose remains the same – providing the possibility to give one’s eyes and ears a rest). The slavish adoption of certain formalistic techniques from video games (extreme slow-motion eye-candy crashes) necessarily come across as clichéd, since game designers like to go to the movies for inspiration. By faithfully imitating bad imitations of films – instead of drawing more from, for example, the quoted Bullitt or other 1970s action movies (knowledge of which the director can only boast about) – Need For Speed becomes a copy of a copy that doesn’t have any specific character of its own. However, I don’t think it’s a bad film, since it fulfils its mission (escapist automotive entertainment) more satisfactorily than, for example, the most recent, poorly focused instalment of Fast & Furious. In the context of macho action melodramas that, according to the logic of the genre, must contain unrealistic feats that are not conditioned by emotion or reason and red-lined moments of action, there really isn’t much for which to reproach Need for Speed. For me, it was a pleasant way to relax my mind, which I appreciated for not requiring any greater mental effort than playing one of the games in the series. 60% (10/03/2014)