Faster Longer Deeper Harder

 Faster Rock Kill Kill!!
It’s all about the revenge in Faster
By Morgan P Salvo

You won’t have to work too hard to keep up with Faster, a bullet-headed, throwaway vengeance flick. Faster is stripped-down to the max and beefed up to the hilt; from title to characters to plot. It never strives to be more, concentrating on making the most of its wild-ass look and self-imposed restrictions.

Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson plays “Driver” an ex-con seeking revenge. The first scene you see is Rock’s pumped up chest heaving and glistening as he paces back and forthin his cell like a caged animal. Upon release, Driver literally sprints to his Chevelle, hidden in a junkyard. He lays some impressive rubber as heavy rock music blares, then like a predatory lizard, walks into an office and shoots a dude right in the head. Clearly Driver is on a mission. He plans to systematically kill anyone associated with his brother’s murder.
On the other side of the spectrum, destined to intertwine, is a drug-addled “Cop” (Billy Bob Thornton) investigating the murder, and “Killer” (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) a guy mysteriously hired to “hit” Driver. Oh, and Carl Gugino plays another cop, but she doesn’t get a cool nick name.

Joe and Tony Gayton’s screenplay fills in the motivations. Steeped in a series of flashbacks everyone has an unnecessary back story that tries to glue the film together and give it some literal heft alongside the relentless gun blazing. Redemption is the key theme. Every character is pathetic on some level. We’re supposed to be sucked in and have some sympathy for this bevy of losers. But once again the realm of soap opera squalor forces everyone to face their own personal hell while we’re left with “so what?”
Director George Tillman Jr. wastes no time. Faster is reminiscent of Michael Mann’s Thief and Dominic Sena’s Gone in 60 Seconds, while spattered and painted with an indie-flick smear. Tillman Jr lays on the ridiculous hyper-reality with reddish hued, earth-toned desert settings, insanely theatrical lighting and an undecipherable chase scene in reverse. Except every camera angle in the book, grainy exposures and changing hue color cannot camouflage Faster’s stumbling, blunt-force narrative style. What’s supremely overlooked and ignored is the fact that it’s virtually impossible for a huge tattooed man-thing looking dude to drive across half of California and Nevada killing guys left and right and not be the target of a massive dragnet, let alone go completely unnoticed when he marches into a hospital to kill a patient at point-blank range (one of the funniest scenes). Tillman Jr incorporates over-the–top sound effects and sound track while Clint Mansell’s heartbeat score is abnormally intense. There’s also a blatant rip-off and unoriginal use of Kenny Rogers and the First Edition’s “What Condition My Condition Is In” c’mon—that’s just flat out sacrilege to The Big Lebowski.
The acting is all over the map. The Rock utters few lines and is not adept at brooding, staying steely-eyed and devilishly stoic, although he’s much better than I’ve ever seen him. Billy Bob does his good-guy/bad-guy routine with a dose of perplexity as to his motives. But the real standout for bad ideas is not only the writing for the character of Killer but the actor who plays him. He’s a total cliché: a dashing, rich guy who drives a Ferrari and has a beautiful blonde girlfriend He may be a trained assassin or just might kill for amusement. Speaking with a strange British accent and flashing a weird smile, Jackson-Cohen lacks the magnitude to inhabit a role that essentially doesn’t fit with the rest of the movie. A more flamboyantly charged performance would’ve worked. Lost stars Maggie Grace and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje also make appearances.

There are some really hilarious lines like when the Killer exclaims “I beat yoga. What’s next?” or when Driver’s ex girlfriend exclaims “I know what you’re doing… I saw it on TV!” Faster is brutal, bloody, tough, gritty, violent and stupid. In other words it has all the elements of a male fantasy revenge flick with a moral code gone berserk. I thought Faster would make me want to bolt as fast as it started, turns out that was not the case. Once it was over though, I couldn’t get it out of my head fast enough.

FASTER
Starring Dwayne Johnson, Billy Bob Thornton, Carla Gugino, Maggie Grace, Oliver Jackson-Cohen, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje
Directed by George Tillman Jr

2 Stars