He ignores red lights. He busts through speed limits. He recklessly endangers schoolchildren for the most foolish reasons. Yeah, Bill de Blasio will probably be first on line to see “Need for Speed.”
Young men and fast cars are automatically stupid together, but even if you set your intelligence level at “off” — and you should — you’ll get a hangover from this cocktail of 200-proof stupid, clinking with moron ice cubes and with an idiot cherry on top.
Aaron Paul, so good in “Breaking Bad” and so not-good here, plays a Mount Kisco, NY, mechanic with a history of bad blood with Dino (Dominic Cooper), a local boy-turned-rich car dealer who offers his ex-rival a shot at refurbishing a rare Mustang that, in tip-top condition, will sell for $2.7 million, with a quarter of that going to Tobey (Paul) and his crew.
After selling the car via a blond British car broker (Imogen Poots), the pair don’t even celebrate the fortune they both just made. Instead, they bet it all on a reckless car race that could easily get someone killed (and do) and/or destroy some priceless Koenigsegg hot rods (and do) and/or get one or more of them thrown in jail (and do).
Why risk everything? Tobey doesn’t seem particularly crazy (he’s framed as reflective and soulful by gobs of milky, somber “Friday Night Lights”-style music). Things are pretty good. The girl Dino stole from him he forgets for the whole rest of the movie (except for a two-minute scene) and he’s just saved his business. He isn’t desperate, hence not a desperado.
More like a dumberado: After a prison stretch, he seeks vengeance against Dino via an illegal road rally in California that he doesn’t have a car to race in. No problem: He just calls the blond broker, Julia. Two seconds later, she pulls up in that $2.7 million Mustang. Which he now has permission to drive and damage as much as he wants, because who wouldn’t give a loser ex-con the keys to the most valuable car on the planet on a vague promise that he might share some prize money if he wins?
Forgetting that a car that needs to be in pristine shape probably shouldn’t be driven 3,000 miles, Tobey takes Julia and starts tearing cross-country, with traffic guidance from a flying-ace buddy (Scott Mescudi), who has one of those rare Army jobs where they let you take any aircraft you want and fly wherever you want with it, no questions asked. Also, the friend borrows a TV station’s traffic helicopter without anyone seeming to notice, while Tobey keeps starting pointless car chases that risk his precious vehicle and endanger countless others. He does things like the “grasshopper” move (speed up a hill you’ve never seen before and hope that it will somehow result in you vaulting all pursuers) and the “hot fuel” move (getting refueled by a truck while slashing down the highway). If things get hairy, he simply chains the roof to a helicopter and gets flown over a canyon. The last time I tried that, I spilled my coffee, but maybe I was doing it wrong.
Slammed feverishly together in the editing room by director Scott Waugh, who makes “Cannonball Run” look like a meticulously accurate documentary, the film stakes everything on the inane and repetitive car chases, which work only in a world in which everything arranges itself to suit the next stunt. At the illegal California road rally, where the top prize is all the other cars (except they all get totalled in the effort), we learn that “cop cars top out at about 130.” Whew, our heroes are in the clear! Because roadblocks haven’t been invented yet.