Director: George Tillman Jr.
Stars: Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Billy Bob Thornton, Oliver Jackson-Cohen
It was only a matter of time before Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson decided to return to the action fold. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s creditable for someone who started out as a wrestler looking to stretch his acting skills a little. Southland Tales, Be Cool to name a few plus those silly kid films, Dwayne’s been using that great charisma and presence in different ways.
But everyone just wants to see him kick ass. He’s back for Wrestlemania in April so it’s about damn time he returned to layeth the smacketh down. And with April nearly here, you’ve got two barrel loads of his action skills. First up is Faster.
Though to call Faster an action film is an outright lie. It’s more of a revenge thriller with a perpetual sense of continuous movement.
From the first moment you see Johnson’s Driver pacing about angrily in his jail cell, you get that theme of always going forward in the revenge tale. Within moments, he gets out of jail and just starts jogging down desert roads to find a car and a swish looking snub revolver. Then Driver goes to layeth the smacketh down on those who’ve wronged him and killed his brother in the process years ago.
While Driver goes off on this vengeful rampage, there’s a Cop (Billy Bob Thornton) trying to follow the murderous crime spree and also a Killer (Jackson-Cohen) a multi-millionaire who has decided to excel himself at bumping people off. They start tracking Driver’s movements and eventually like all good revenge films, their paths will cross.
Now while I don’t mind an array of colourful and OTT characters in this sort of B-movie fluff, the fact that these are three very different characters makes it a bit of an oddity. You have Johnson who is supposed to be the real driving force of the movie, the wronged man committing acts of horrific violence against those who wrong him and seemingly satisfied he’s walking the dark path. Thorton is a ex-junkie cop who’s days near to retirement and trying to provide for his family. And Jackson-Cohen seems to be emitting a mid-life crisis for a billionaire who’s done everything and wants to satisfy his ticks before marrying his beautiful girlfriend. The balance of characters is just weird here in this triangle.
There is this theme of redemption and forgiveness that runs throughout and that’s fine here. But I still think the mixture of these three characters is a little too much.
I personally would have liked to see things just kept focused on Johnson and it would have been a great dark revenge thriller. Johnson has the presence and his small amount of dialogue lets him convey emotion more visually in his facial reactions and he’s still the best of the WWE bunch to ever grace the big screen. It’s a nice role to get him back into the genre we all know he belongs in.
While I’ve got no issue with Thornton’s presence, only to add some sort of gravitas to a usually cardboard character, and while I know that Jackson-Cohen’s British hitman might grate some people, Faster would have worked so much better focused on one character. Driver, it’s actual main character.
Faster is visually pleasing and it has its entertaining (even though predictable) moments but when the main character has to play third fiddle to the other characters, it seems a bit diluted in the end and the revenge tale becomes somewhat like a weird urban dream.
Well, on the plus side, it isn’t named Faster: Action Revenge Film like Dwayne’s next production.
