Faster

Faster (2010)

43% on Rotten Tomatoes (out of 63 reviews)

Runtime: 95 minutes

Directed by: George Tillman Jr.

Starring: Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Billy Bob Thornton, Oliver Jackson-Cohen, Carla Gugino

From: CBS Films

Here is a movie I saw last Friday, but it’s just now that I’ve gotten around to writing a review of it. Like the last movie I reviewed, it revolves around getting revenge… before that, though, let me mention something new at the location I saw this at, Downtown Disney.

The AMC Theatres at Walt Disney World now have a special concession stand. The other one is the same as usual, but they have a new one and it’s cafeteria-style. I had heard online that something geeky and new (at least to Florida) would be there and I wanted to try it. They have some drink machines known as Coca Cola Freestyle. It’s a machine which offers 106 (!) different flavors of Coke products. It’s mainly flavors that you can’t get anywhere else (or are foreign) such as Coca Cola Orange, Grape Vault, and Peach Sprite. The latter two are delicious, as I can personally confirm. That machine alone is enough for me to want to go there and watch movies exclusively. What a dork I am, I know.

The movie was the only thing at that time in night that I was interested in seeing. I heard some strong reviews from some messageboards so I decided to pay money to see the tale of Driver get revenge on the people who double-crossed him and killed his brother.

Like I just said, it’s a revenge tale where Rock goes after the people who killed his brother. What happened was that he, his brother, and some others participated in a bank robbery. They got away but some people track down the gang and not only acquire their robbery dough, but the brother gets gunned down. Rock goes to jail for an amount of time. He gets released and immediately goes after those people as a means of revenge. It sounds simple, but there’s also a pair of cops (Thornton, Gugino) who goes after Rock for killing those people, and there’s also a guy known as Killer (I’m not joking with the names of Killer and Driver; that’s how they’re ID’ed in the movie!) who is a British dude that was sick as a child but got better and to a preposterous degree he is successful as an adult, with fancy exotic cars, an attractive lady (Maggie Grace), and he’s a great contract killer too.

As others online have said, the character of Killer just doesn’t work. It’s way too ridiculous to believe that Killer could ever exist in the real world, or even in the world of this movie, where Driver was able to elude capture despite gunning down a few people. No way could I believe that character was real. Not to mention, what bothered most people was that the character was just annoying and a whiny twit, which I do agree with. I was more turned off by how science fiction Killer was, but to each their own.

It’s a shame as if it wasn’t for that, I would have enjoyed the movie quite a bit more. As is, even with a bad character, it wasn’t such a turn-off (like the one REALLY bad character in Iron Man 2, for example) that it completely tanked things for me. Then again, Iron Man 2 even without that one character was a wild disappointment. Anyhow, Faster still is a gritty and downbeat 70’s style movie filled with a bunch of characters that are dark and have many problems. The action is brutal, with several bullets to the head, shown in graphic detail. Rock doesn’t say too many words. The story is rather simplistic but still entertaining, if you enjoy that sort of thing. It’s just unfortunate that Killer was such a poor character. Still, I am glad that Rock has finally returned to action movies rather than dreck like The Tooth Fairy or that Escape From Witch Mountain flick.

I’ll be back Sunday night with a new review.