George Tillman Jr.'s Faster is a sexy, alluring and sprightly-shot piece of junk - an unrelentingly messy and diffusive revenge thriller that's so fundamentally and structurally incompetent that it saps nearly all of the bite and snarl out of Dwayne Johnson and his mainline quest for brotherly vengeance. -
The script by brothers Tony Gayton and Joe Gayton, which seems to be stuck somewhere between bare-knuckled 80's vigilante thriller and 21st-century post-Tarantino pulp, relies heavily on all manner of senseless flashbacks, needless characters and foolhardy plot twists (including a true laugher in the final reel.)
-
As the aptly named Driver (Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson) muscles through his first few hits on his neatly-typed list of names, he's pursued by the rugged, drug-addled Cop (Billy Bob Thornton) and the dapper, egomaniacal Killer (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) who, when he isn't shooting guns with his blushing bride (Maggie Grace) in the desert seems to be simply searching, gun in hand, for a reason for his character to exist.
-
And as the hitlist shrinks, Driver's trigger-finger loosens and Faster takes a turn for the serious, a gross miscalculation in a film that begs to be to anything but. It's a sad state when a simple revenge-thriller can't even stay on task. [C-]
Posts
It will probably leave your mind as soon as you leave the theater, but for the time you have with it, your having a good time, it just could have been better. Good review, check out mine when you can!
ReplyDelete