By It’s been over a decade since the Rock’s (Dwayne Johnson) film debut, and sadly the closest he’s ever come to a good role that isn’t a throwaway comic relief slot is probably the five minutes he had in The Mummy Returns – not to be confused with the disaster that was The Scorpion King – and all these years later he hasn’t come too far.
So imagine my surprise when the first ten minutes of Faster were actually pretty awesome, and then imagine my anger when the rest of the movie was awful. I’m telling you to imagine these things in hopes that you don’t actually see this movie in theaters and experience them for yourself.
It’s been over a decade since the Rock’s (Dwayne Johnson) film debut, and sadly the closest he’s ever come to a good role that isn’t a throwaway comic relief slot is probably the five minutes he had in The Mummy Returns – not to be confused with the disaster that was The Scorpion King – and all these years later he hasn’t come too far.
So imagine my surprise when the first ten minutes of Faster were actually pretty awesome, and then imagine my anger when the rest of the movie was awful. I’m telling you to imagine these things in hopes that you don’t actually see this movie in theaters and experience them for yourself.{{page_break}}
You know how it can be tiring to see every revenge story play out all the typical nuances when really all you want to see them do is race from point A to point B and blow someone away? It’s not that we want the violence, it’s that the characters in the story really just want nothing more than to kill someone, so why so much time and effort waste on everything else? This is exactly how the movie starts, and I loved it for that reason. But then the rest of the movie is every typical trope we all know so well, and it doesn’t even accomplish them without flaws stemming from bad writing, bad acting, and bad directing.
I’ve been trying to talk people out of calling Billy Bob Thornton a “good” actor for years, and encouraging them to agree he’s just an “okay” actor, and Faster is further evidence of this. He’s given a pretty mundane police role and doesn’t get buried by it, but doesn’t elevate it either. Booze and drugs are nothing new to his personas so he just clocks in and clocks out.
With the Rock we actually see some age starting to show, but when his lips are shut he’s still every bit as intimidating as ever. As for his performance, the only good thing I can mention is that it’s not the worst, but that’s the only compliment he gets.
To be fair to the actors who didn’t ruin it all on their own, much of the blame goes to a script with cheesy dialogue and bad pacing. Is a scene over? Nope, someone decides to run outside and yell out something really fast. Heroin scene? Let’s follow it by just going straight to bed. From here things get even worse as the film gets incredibly predictable. Someone has a metal plate in their head, which obviously is not important whatsoever. Someone also hired an assassin, and the film is incredibly proud of revealing their identity to us about an hour after we figured it out.
Even the setup was flawed. The beginning lays out a simple, gritty, Tarantino-esque foundation that grabs the audience by the ears and says “Okay, this is the cop, because text on the screen says so. This is the convicted driver. This is the assassin.” Problem is, the assassin (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) doesn’t pan out well at all. He’s supposed to be a rich tycoon who takes up killing for fun and is unwisely going off his meds, but after a talk with his romantic partner, and a spastic talk with his therapist, all we get from there on out are a few clips of him fiddling with pill bottles. It’s like the director clapped his hands together thinking that would suffice. I feel bad because he could have been a great third pillar – and he needed to be – but to say this was what toppled the whole story would be a disservice to all the other faults that deserve to share the blame.
One of the only good things about the movie is that the audio of the engine and gunshots were loud enough to make you uncomfortable, since, you know, that’s how they are in real life. I’m a fan of that, but when the best thing you have to say about several car chase scenes is that they sounded cool, then you have a terrible film.
Overall Score: 4.90 – Terrible. (4s are terrible in many ways. They’re bad enough that even diehard fans of its genre, director, or cast still probably won’t enjoy it at all, and everyone else will leave the theater incredibly angry. Not only are these not worth renting, you should even change the TV channel on them in the future.)
Sean Walsh:
Overall Score: 7.25 — On the scale of Dwayne Johnson movies, Faster clocks in right next to Walking Tall; a totally watchable, highly entertaining action movie you don’t need to invest too many brain cells into and can still thoroughly enjoy. You can read his full review here!