LITTLE ROCK — I’ll admit, walking into a one-word-titled movie starring The Rock, I was primed and ready to write a scathing review.
Faster would be my excuse for a diatribe on mindless action movies starring wannabe actors. I had all my Van Damme and Lundgren comparisons ready.
Then I saw the movie.
And I’ll say, The Godfather this ain’t, but I must admit my guilt for judging a book by its cover (or an actor by his wrestling past).
Despite being poorly titled, Faster is an entertaining tale of revenge and redemption.
Dwayne Johnson (aka The Rock) stars as an ex-con (identified only as “Driver”) hell-bent on avenging the death of his brother. Billy Bob Thornton co-stars as one of the detectives out to stop Driver before he lays waste to LA, Vegas and everything in between.
This movie works because Johnson isn’t required to do much beyond looking pissed off, flexing his muscles, shooting people and driving a loud car. It’s like Meg Ryan playing a woman who has to cry a lot in a Nora Ephron film, or Chuck Norris doing a demonstration video on roundhouse kicks to the face; it’s what they do best.
What surprised me was that Faster had something of a soul. Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (Mr. Eko from Lost) shows up near the end of the film with a message for Driver about the nature of revenge. The message is simple and borderlines on simplistic, but the two characters’ interaction prevented the film from being one big killing spree with no point.
What didn’t have a point was the inclusion of a character played by Oliver Jackson-Cohen. He plays an assassin who, apparently, is some kind of genius who masters everything he does — except killing The Rock, of course. His whole storyline is pointless to the arc of the film’s story. The assassin’s love interest is played by Maggie Grace (Shannon from Lost), and we get to see plenty of scenes with her slinking around wearing not too much. Still doesn’t justify their story line.
For Billy Bob, hopefully this is a step in the right direction for his career. His character in Faster isn’t very original. He’s a cop about to retire who has a drug problem and who is trying to patch things up with his ex-wife. And by the way, he’s chasing a dude who’s killing bad guys.
And then there’s the name. Aside from one chase scene involving Driver and the assassin, there’s not really a lot of scenes that involve anyone doing anything “faster.” If you’re going to go with a one-word movie title, take a lesson from Speed: It needs to be painfully self-explanatory, to the point that it’s almost insulting to the audience’s intelligence. If you were going to sum this film up in one word, director George Tillman Jr. would have been better to go with something like “Revenge” or “Vengeance” or “Big-Freakin’-Gun.”
The “twist ending” seals Faster’s fate as a middle-of-the-road action flick that reaches for some good things, but comes up a little short. In the end, it’s not enough for a movie to look like it has a soul. It needs to actually have a soul.
But all in all, we can smell what The Rock is cooking, and it doesn’t smell too bad.