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bluemeanie
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Posted: December 6, 2010 at 4:33am
What a bad, bad, bad, bad movie.
You have characters named "Driver" and "Cop" and "Killer". You have elaborately staged fight sequences that make you wonder where in the hell John Cena is in all this mess. You have Billy Bob Thornton doing his best Billy Bob Thornton and Dwayne Johnson doing his best The Rock and newcomer Oliver Jackson-Cohen turning in a performance that is not likely to win him many roles outside of this amped up, ridiculous style. "Faster" is a film without a brain, without a heart and without a soul. It's simply a film with muscles...and guns.
The film opens with Driver (Dwayne Johnson) getting released from prison. Warden (Tom Berenger) explains how he can turn his life around but Driver has a determination in his eyes. When he walks out of prison and immediately goes and blows a guy's head off -- we know he might have some unfinished business. Seems his brother was killed by a group of shady individuals and his mission is to now track down each member of this group and kill them as dead as possible. Cop (Billy Bob Thornton) is in hot pursuit as is Killer (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), a hitman hired to kill Driver, a hitman who was a former software guru turned billionaire now married to Maggie Grace.
As revenge flicks go, "Faster" is lame, lame, lame. None of the kills are very original and Dwayne Johnson has all of the emotional baggage of a stuffed panda. I have seen Dwayne Johnson turn in charismatic and passionate performances. In "Faster" he walks through the film like a zombie, never connects with anyone or anything and has a couple of sequences that are pretty pathetic in the acting department. I wanted an entire film of Billy Bob Thornton doing whatever in the hell they told him to do which was, basically, be as redneck and crazy and drunk and sad as possible -- be "Bad Santa" with a badge. He obliges.
This film really is a shame because I, like numerous other fans out there, was hoping to see Dwayne Johnson finally make another decent film. He had such a positive streak and then he got stuck in a string of crap for kids where his biggest threat was how to get out of a tutu. "Faster" does not offer a return to form. Hell, Kevin Bacon's revenge film, "Death Sentence", was more entertaining than this. And Oliver Jackson-Cohen? It was like he was in a completely different movie with a completely different tone. Unfortunately for him, his movie was just as uninteresting as Dwayne Johnson's. This film couldn't have ended any 'faster' for me. Hardy-Har. 4/10.
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Crispy
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Posted: September 25, 2012 at 1:02pm
Average flick at best. High four, low five. They were trying to give it this dark, gritty tone, but all they managed to do was suck the life and charisma out of the film.
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