Still, it’s not until the last lap of their 45-hour cross-country journey that Tobey lets the girl drive so he can take a fast nap before the Mendocino finale. And Poots recalls English actresses of 40, 50 years ago - the enormous eyes of Rita Tushingham, the fetching, platypus mouth and careless sex appeal of Susan George - and is nearly plausible as a capable racer. Cooper is a better choice for Dino he mans the wheels of his swank cars with the shifty-eyed intensity of a guy watching porn in his work cubicle. Short and unprepossessing, he’s not hero material, though by glowering and dropping his voice an octave he can pass for an outlaw adult. Paul, known to Breaking Bad fans as the whiny, needy, half-bright Jesse Pinkman, originally auditioned for the Dino role. Tobey’s pit crew mirrors the tokenistic ethnic diversity of Fast & Furious - the black guy (Mescudi), the Hispanic guy (Ramon Rodriguez), the Arab guy (Rami Malek) and the cute blond dead Pete (Australia’s Harrison Gilbertson) - each with one quirk, none with distinctive appeal. The script, by George Gatins from a story he contrived with his brother John (who wrote the Denzel Washington drama Flight), is generic revenge motif: the poor boy hates the rich kid not only for his myriad evil qualities but because he stole Tobey’s girl Anita (Dakota Johnson, quite a bit of whom will be seen as the female lead in next year’s Fifty Shades of Grey film). Like an abandoned vehicle with a complex motor that legendary Mustang retooler Carroll Shelby would be proud of, Need for Speed won’t win prizes for dramaturgy. Dino’s thugs have totaled Tobey’s Mustang, so he’s at the wheel of what car? The red one Dino was driving when he sent Pete on his trip to that automobile graveyard in the sky. Winding through the forests and coastal highways of Mendocino, this is a winner-take-all challenge for six contestants - including, of course, Dino - and, eventually, dozens of police cars and copters.
Happy middle, actually, since Tobey is headed to San Francisco for the big, super-secret De Leon race masterminded by a manic entrepreneur named Monarch (Michael Keaton), who oversees and narrates the action like Wolfman Jack in American Graffiti. (READ: Richard Schickel’s 1991 cover story on Thelma & Louiseby subscribing to TIME) They’re like Thelma and Louise, only with a happy ending. Flying above the car, Benny drops a long seat belt, which Tobey buckles just as the Mustang sails off a cliff, and the chopper totes him and Julia to safety. Fortunately, his buddy Benny (Scott Mescudi, aka rapper Kid Cudi), who spends most of the movie hijacking one plane or another, has accessed a U.S. Later in Need for Speed, Tobey, driving his retooled Ford Mustang cross-country with Brit bird Julia Maddon (Imogen Poots), is pursued by Dino’s rifle-toting goons through the Utah Canyonlands and toward the Moab Fault. Kinetic immediacy obliterates factual memory, and art - which in today’s films so often, too often, means gorgeous VFX or daredevil stunt work - transcends life and death. Such is the (possibly toxic) power of a superbly crafted action sequence over the moviegoer. His eyes are transfixed by the choreography and spectacle of the stunt, the horrific majesty of the red car’s launch and torque, its fiery collision with the pole and its fatal descent, like winged Icarus, into the water. (READ: Fast & Furious 7 director Justin Lin on the life and death of Paul Walker)Īnd the weird thing is that, while watching this scene, even a viewer who had the details of Walker’s death seared into his brain doesn’t think about them. Dino’s killer car, like Paul Walker’s, is red. When Dino realizes he’s about to lose the race, he back-ends Pete’s car, which takes flight, hits a light pole on a bridge, bursts into flames and crashes in the river below. In the first act, three guys - brooding speedster Tobey Marshall (Aaron Paul), his cute greasemonkey Pete (Harrison Gilbertson) and the rich bad guy Dino Brewster (Dominic Cooper) - race identical cars down the highways of Mount Kisco, N.Y. Can’t wait till 2015 for a movie about car races, chases and crashes? Here’s Need for Speed, based on the world’s top-selling racing video game.
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