So You Won't Have To: Faster

Here's a general rule of thumb for action writers, directors, and editors: if you're going to have a revenge movie named Faster, it's best not to pace the film in such a lifeless, plodding manner. You might want to seriously re-consider the "Slow Justice is No Justice" tagline if your film takes place over the course of five days during which the police never consider putting an APB out on a 1970s Chevelle with a driver who looks suspiciously like WWE Superstar The Rock. It might not hurt to drop the totally unnecessary third protagonist who, as it turns out, exits the film with about as much impact as he does entering the film.

The protagonists are, for the record: Jake Collum (Dwayne Johnson), anti-hero heist driver seeking revenge on his brother's killers; Slade Humphries (Billy Bob Thornton), anti-hero cop with a heroin addiction and one week left until retirement; Killer (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), an anti-hero assassin who is willing to give up his murdering ways in order to be with Lily (Maggie Grace), his girlfriend. If you really feel like it, throw in Carla Gugino as Cicero, a detective investigating Collum's revenge killings.

(In almost every review, Johnson and Thornton are listed as "Driver" and "Cop", because of their respective job descriptions and, well, that's the name credited to them, but if you take the time to actually look at the screen, you'll notice print-outs with their actual names on them - Thornton's more than once)

Faster desperately wants to blend the aesthetics of the Crank films with the neo-noir storytelling of Point Blank, but fails on both counts. If writers Tony and Joe Gayton or director George Tillman, Jr. had stuck with the simple "revenge" story, then Faster may well have been a gritty, efficient thriller with some noir-ish overtones, but the film is over cluttered with main characters, all of whom are jockeying for the position of "person we're supposed to care about." After spending the first fifteen minutes with Johnson, setting up why he wants revenge and his no-frills style of murder, Faster abruptly jumps into introducing Gugino, Thornton, Jackson-Cohen, and Grace.

From that point on, the audience spends inordinate amounts of time watching Killer talk to his therapist over the phone, wax philosophic about "giving up the job" and marrying Lily, or with Humphries ("Cop") as he tries to win back his former Criminal Informant / Junkie wife Marina (Blogorium favorite Moon Bloodgood) and son Tommy (Aedin Mincks). So much of the film is spent with Thornton's Slade Humphries that I re-titled the film "Bad Santa: Port of Call Bakersfield," which is surprising appropriate considering how reminiscent his story is of other Thornton roles (specifically Bad Santa and The Bad News Bears) and my most recent favorite Nicolas Cage film.

Mind you, this is the movie without the central premise of Faster, the one they've been advertising, where Dwayne Johnson hunts down and kills the four (?) people responsible for his brother's death. It doesn't account for minor characters like Mike Epps' private investigator Roy Grone or Xander Berkeley's Sergeant Mallory, or Dexter's Jennifer Carpenter, who plays... well, I'm guessing "Driver"'s ex-girlfriend, or it might be Driver's Brother's (Matt Gerald) ex. We're already needlessly convoluted, and that's not even taking into account the "twists" of who hired Killer or what "Cop" has to do with any of this.

To cram all of this into a 98 minute movie seems like it should leave audiences breathless, or trying to keep up with the story, but Faster makes every effort to over-explain plot points, to the point where it becomes redundant. If you needed the "twist" to be explained to you (as it is, twice) before Faster gets to the end, I'm sorry, but movies might be a little too much for you to deal with. However, there's no excuse for showing a car-chase flashback that demonstrates Johnson's "driver" abilities, only to follow it with the line "they got away" by Cicero. It's embarrassing; there's no other way for me to describe it, and Faster is full of "no kidding!" lines.

After spending some self-imposed time in Disney purgatory, it was nice to see Dwayne Johnson return to the "tough guy" role he seemed primed for in The Rundown and Walking Tall. He has the build, the charisma, and yes, even the chops for it, but Faster does him a great disservice. Johnson becomes a second fiddle in his own movie for most of the second half of the film, and if Faster's writers or director had the discipline to focus the film to be something more like Point Blank (and yes, the echoes are apparent throughout), this review might be something else. I'm really not that hard to please with action films: give me something with a sense of momentum, some nice fight scenes, a charismatic lead, and a plausible story. Faster could have easily fulfilled that request, but it didn't: Faster is overwritten, cluttered, turgid, and lacks momentum that even its pluses feel neutered.

The only positive thing I came out of seeing Faster was to learn two of the three characters' names, something most critics can't seem to be bothered with.