Need For Speed (Cinema Screening)

(Spoiler free)

It is no secret that Fast & Furious is the dominant film franchise when it comes to street racing, however when you really think about it this genre isn’t really overcrowded like many others.  I am a huge fan of the Fast & Furious series, it is one of my all time favourites so I was actually really pleased to hear about this movie, I welcome films that are similar to it because I am more than likely going to enjoy them! I also grew up playing a lot of the Need for Speed games so this only added to the appeal, I had a kickass Mazda RX8, just sayin!

Need for Speed is no Fast & Furious, I will say that straight off however I still thoroughly enjoyed this movie and it made a great attempt at competing with its rivals. Need For Speed got the basics right, throughout the film it displays unreal looking cars that sound great and the chase/race sequences all deliver as well, this was good.  Where it lacked was its characters, I didn’t think very many of these were strong maybe apart from Finn.  Now several of the characters did become likeable as the film progressed but for me it took too long for this too happen, Imogen Poots stereotypical performance of a British female was quite annoying and the character Pete looked like he had been plucked straight out of a boyband.  I really couldn’t make my mind up about Dominic Cooper as the films villain, at times he was great but on too many occasions I was left a little unconvinced, he never really seemed that much of a threat which was a shame because there was potential here however he gets the job done.  Oh and what was Kid Cudi doing in this film, he was fine I suppose but his attempt at being the character to inject humour into the film didn’t really work although this is a fault with the script and not his performance.

In the final sequence there were several obvious continuity errors which was really just quite sloppy, usually things like that don’t bother me but when they are so obvious it is a little frustrating.  Aaron Paul does a good job as the lead in Need for Speed and I could really see him develop into this role.  The crash and stunt scenes were really impressive though, and I am excited to see what heights can be reached with these in the future, the addition of music to some of these scenes would have helped but they were strong enough to hold their own.  The music that was featured was great, I wish it had been featured more however when it was I really enjoyed it especially in the finale, this was effective.  Need For Speed delivered much of what I expected, I knew I would enjoy it but not to the same level as Fast & Furious.  I really hope that it can spawn a sequel and even a series as I could see the characters and the action really develop much like Fast & Furious and in my opinion you can’t have too many supercar film series!

BIGGEST FLAW – Continuity errors

BIGGEST ACHIEVEMENT – Stunt scenes

Rating – 7.5/10