Need for Speed (2014)

Besides being a huge fan of movies, I have been playing games ever since the original Pong home machines. One of my favorite genres has always been racing games. Ever since the Indy game on the Atari 2600 I have been playing them and it is a genre which has developed a lot through the various hardware generations. The first Gran Turismo game took it to a place which was new, where you could race a normal every day car. Besides the very realistic racing games there are the so-called arcade racers. These games are less about realism and more about thrills. I played a lot of these games (Burnout and Split Second come to mind).

The Need for Speed games have been fixed part of arcade racing games, with new installments released yearly. I must admit that I never was a fan of the games. Reason for that is that they are games where you hardly use the brakes and where corners only seem to exist that you can take at high-speed. I never felt they were very challenging or exciting and therefore rarely bought them. The Need for Speed Shift games changed as they moved away from arcade racing and were more simulation based games, more realistic. I did play those games quite a bit.
Movies based on games usually aren’t very good and when I heard this franchise was making the step to film I was not really looking forward to it. Still, there was a chance that it would be interesting. The Fast and Furious movies have proven in the past that movies with a focus on cars can be very enjoyable.

The move to big screen has resulted in a movie which feels like a mix of Fast & Furious, Smokey and the Bandit and other chase/road trip movies. Tobey Marshall (Aaron Paul) is running the garage he inherited from his father. Unfortunately business is not going very well and he and his team of mechanics get a chance to build a supercar and earn a lot of money. The man who gives them the job though is an old rival of Tobey, Dino Brewster (Dominic Cooper). The rivalry flares up again and to prove that he is the best racer Tobey decides to take place in a secret race only the best drivers can participate in, run by Monarch (Michael Keaton). He manages to get a fast car (along with Imogen Poots, who has to make sure the car is ok) and only has a short time to get to the other side of America, with others trying to stop them.

It is a story which really is not that special and at times extremely predictable (is you know that there is an overenthusiastic brother and you are racing you can guess what will happen to him), but let’s be honest…the first Fast and Furious movie was like that as well. People loved that film though because of the cars and racing. That aspect of the movie does not disappoint with the most expensive supercars showing up and racing sequences without any CG. That means that crashes are real and all the more convincing. The cast to me felt like a very young one (although I might just be getting old), but are mostly good (although they did not manage to make all the funny moments work).
Need for Speed has not been getting amazing reviews and I understand the negative points critics are talking about, but the movie shows potential in setting up a franchise to rival Fast and Furious. Those movies needed to get their footing as well before kicking into high gear and if there are more movies with this title (something which would not surprise me looking at the history of the games) I am sure they will keep improving.