Faster (2010)

Remember when there used to be tons of action stars? I mean, there still are, but there are no longer tons of young action stars. Really all you’ve got is Jason Statham and The Rock.[1][2] Anyway, the next one has Jason Statham, so necessarily Faster has The Rock. And while I think he’s really quite a good actor, most of the awesomeness in this movie happened when he wasn’t speaking at all. But I’m ahead of myself. What you should ought to know is that said Rock has just been released from prison and is on a mission of revenge against the people who murdered his brother right before he went to prison. And, man, what a mission. His first victim is felled within maybe an hour of his release, which I “spoil” only to make it clear (as the previews did identically before me) that this is a movie that is not fucking around.

Everything from there forward is a race between our anti-hero, an assassin hired by one of his impending victims, and a broken down cop at the end of his career, to see which of the three missions will be completed first. The Rock really is the star of the show, and not just because the script dictates it. The first shot shows him pacing across his tiny prison cell, waiting for the moment of release, and it’s easy to believe that, like a shark in a goldfish bowl, he’s been pacing those same steps all ten years. And after release, he never really seems to stop moving, not to emote, hardly ever even to speak, and that’s what I meant earlier. The only really deep theme of the movie is that (again, like a shark) motion equals life, and any time spent away from that, the character is diminished.

It’s a spare movie with almost monomaniacal focus, but what it is doing, it does very well. It’s not that important or anything, but it’s quite good. My only real complaint is with the assassin character, and it’s a weird one. He was over-developed, which of course you want character development, right? But he’s really an outsider to the plot, and to the extent that you care about the plot, every scene that delves into his backstory is fingernail-on-chalkboard levels of out of place. As a foil to The Rock’s non-stop brutality, his careful planning and finesse would work really well. As an alternative main character, and that really is the amount of development he receives, it feels like he wandered into the wrong movie by mistake. Which is too bad, as either movie might have been decent (though I’m sure this one was the better of the two options); but both of them suffer by being crammed together like this.

[1] Vin Diesel kinda disappeared; I can only assume he is in the middle of a really excellent D&D campaign and will rejoin us by 2012.
[2] Shia LaBeouf? Seriously? I can end you, you know.

One thought on “Faster (2010)

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.