Car Talk: NEED FOR SPEED

Need for Speed is never better than when it spends time hurtling along in and around cars going top speeds down city streets, country roads, highways, and byways, racing and chasing in reckless and exciting ways. Luckily, those sequences feel like they take up just about the entire movie. It’s a fairly preposterous plot full of posturing archetypes, the kind who can’t handle much of an emotive burden and are never as funny as the movie thinks they are. They’re there only to help create enough of a story to string along scene after scene of cars zooming, providing just enough downtime and modulations of noise to prevent the whole movie from becoming a monotonous squeal of tires. When those cars peal out down the road, with burning rubber and roaring engines, it’s a visceral kick. With a movie like Need for Speed, based on a series of racing video games and advertised as a nonstop chase, what more do you need to see? It’s important not to cheat yourself out of simple movie pleasures such as these.

Director and co-editor Scott Waugh worked for many years as a stunt coordinator and stuntman on all manner of big exciting action sequences in films for the likes of John McTiernan, Michael Bay, and Doug Liman. He knows his way around a car chase, shooting them at top speeds with crisp, smeary digital photography that catches a motion blur off the gleaming paint as the sound design works with a bass kick of gears shifting and tires sliding. The star of the movie is a modified Ford Mustang. Waugh is always sure to let the camera linger on car logos, giving each new vehicle entrances that are usually reserved for starlets and special guest stars. The Mustang is tricked out to go fast; its top speed is somewhere just north of 230 miles per hour. A financially struggling mechanic (Aaron Paul) does the job for a snobby and insecure professional racecar driver (Dominic Cooper). They may be the humans that make the cars move, but their interpersonal struggles are sublimated at every turn into the action of the vehicles through the aggression of their driving.

And Paul certainly has reasons to be angry with Cooper, who cheats him out of millions of dollars, causes a drag racing accident that kills a close friend, and then flees the scene leaving him to take the blame. After a couple years in prison on manslaughter charges, Paul is ready for some macho car culture vengeance. He wants to reclaim his good name and expose Cooper as the smug villain he is. Paul is so good at playing the good-hearted criminal in over his head and paying for it through palpable emotional pain. He did it for five seasons on Breaking Bad, after all. Need for Speed calls on him to play a similar emotional range, but lighter, pulpier. He’s surrounded by a gang of smiling gearheads (Rami Malek, Scott Mescudi, Ramon Rodriguez) eager to help him, and a pretty car-loving girl (Imogen Poots) willing to ride shotgun. The plan is to zoom from New York to California in 45 hours, getting the attention of a webcasting drag race tycoon (Michael Keaton) along the way so he’ll give them an invitation to his infamous race and meet the enemy behind the wheel once more.

Does that make a whole lot of sense? I’m not so sure. But the screenplay by George and John Gatins uses it as an excuse to send the Mustang flying down the highway at over 100 miles an hour most of the way. Every few states, there’s a new obstacle. They appear with all the regularity of video game villains. In Detroit, there are cops who pursue them. In Nebraska, a state trooper spots them. In Utah, there are greedy bounty hunters. In California, there are other racers, still more cops, and, of course, Dominic Cooper, who would be twirling his mustache if only he had one. Most of the action takes place in broad daylight, the better to appreciate the impressive stunt work on display. The camera sits on the side of the road, hangs off of cars, flings forward into crashes, and stands back to take in spinning debris. It’s clearly and energetically cut together, ready to show off its best assets.

Waugh has grown as a filmmaker since his debut film, the military actioner Act of Valor, showed a glimmer of promise buried under a self-serious plot, stiff tone, and muddy action. Need for Speed takes itself the right amount of serious, which is to say not enough to be a drag. Waugh lets the scenes between the action get carried along by fine actors in thin parts before plunging back into the well-choreographed excitement of cars going very fast. He knows exactly what kind of movie it is, a throwback to films like H.B. Halicki’s Gone in 60 Seconds and Hal Needham’s Smokey and the Bandit, B-movies directed by stuntmen who reveled in sending real cars careening down real roadways. It’s a movie where the hero gets right up in the face of the villain (so close, watching with the sound down might make you think they’re about to make out) and threatens to prove who is the better man by winning the big race. It’s a movie that is bookended by a symbol (first abstract, later literal) of a lighthouse standing erect at the beachside finish line, to really hammer home the masculinity at stake. It’s a movie where inarticulate characters feel big emotions, anger, love, joy, and express them all by driving as fast as they can.

A Bumpy FLIGHT

Howard Hawks once said a good movie has three good scenes and no bad scenes. Flight, director Robert Zemeckis’s first live-action movie in twelve years, tweaks the formula by giving us three great scenes and a few bad ones. Two of the great scenes are right up front. The opening puts us in a hotel room with airline pilot Whip Whitaker (Denzel Washington) and the flight attendant (Nadine Velazquez) he spent the night with. The camera’s nonchalant capture of skin, sheets, and bottles of booze reveals a director who, after making (mostly great) animated movies over the past decade, is reveling in his return to live action, to flesh and blood and earthly pleasures. The pilot, slow to wake up, does a line of cocaine, snorting it up as classic rock on the soundtrack blares to life and the camera flings back with his newly energized head. He’s ready to go, and so is the movie.

Right away, the script by John Gatins puts the audience in the unusual position of not knowing how to take the main character. There’s an instinctive cringing dread to seeing a pilot drunkenly inhale coke before a flight, but the smart casting balances this out. Denzel Washington, confident and cool, has intense audience affection. (He’s one of the few true Movie Stars left). The audience wants to root for Denzel the wise, Denzel the tough-but-fair, but the movie gives us a different kind of Washington role. Here his bravado is empty. He’s good at his job, very good as we’ll soon find out, but his addictions have gotten the best of him. His overconfident suaveness covers up all manner of lies and deceptions that are barely hidden from sight. In a small gesture Zemeckis catches in the corner of a frame, Whitaker slips, only just catching his footing, while climbing aboard the plane.

In the movie’s next great scene, the ordinary flight goes horribly wrong, but not because of its impaired pilot. Suffering devastating mechanical failure, the plane enters a terrifying nosedive. The shot that looks through the cockpit window as the clouds part to reveal the rapidly approaching ground is a gripping moment of stomach-flipping suspense. With convincing special effects and precise blocking, the plane crashes. With miraculous quick thinking, Captain Whitaker brings the plane down relatively safely, through a scary, effective extended scene in which the plane, falling out of the sky, ends up flying upside down before slicing through a church steeple and slamming into a field. Somehow, out of 102 people aboard the flight, 96 survive.

The film follows the aftermath of this accident. The media calls the pilot a hero. The pilots’ union rep (Bruce Greenwood) tells Whitaker to keep a low profile, to not speak to the press. The union calls in a lawyer (Don Cheadle) to handle the criminal side of the accident investigation. It’s clear that the plane suffered mechanical difficulties. It’s also clear that the pilot was inebriated. He is hero; he is a criminal. The film creates a convincing scenario from which there can be no easy answers, from which there’s no easy way out. It’s perhaps somewhat inevitable that, in pursuit of some sort of resolution, the film can’t bring this conflict to a convincing resolution. That it tries is its biggest miscalculation.

Until that point, however, the film is an intermittently gripping character study in the body of a procedural. As the accident investigation moves forward, step by methodical step, Whitaker struggles with his addictions to drugs and alcohol. He calls his dealer (John Goodman), but refuses to take more drugs. He befriends an addict (Kelly Reilly) and encourages her to get help, all the while refusing to admit he has problems of his own. In a quick-cut montage, he dumps all his booze down the drain, but days later buys a case and can’t even get out of the parking lot before he takes a swig.

He’s a man given a big wake-up call, a near-death experience that might result in his going to prison, and yet he still refuses to let himself admit that he has a problem. One night, confronted about his drinking, he bellows that he “chooses to drink.” Advised by his lawyer to stop drinking, Whitaker calmly says that he will. He thinks he can stop cold turkey by simply choosing to do so, through his sheer force of will. The last great scene in the film involves the soft hum of a refrigerator generating suspense in the middle of the night. It calls to Whitaker. Will he open it? Will he break his sobriety once more?

Gatins script could have been directed as nothing more than a standard Hollywood substance abuse parable and, though it occasionally is just that, especially in the painfully obvious music cues, it’s often energized by Zemeckis’s confident, composed studio dramaturgy and Washington’s seemingly effortlessly complicated performance. The only problem with creating such a high-flying drama is the high probability that it’ll be brought in for a crash landing. In a funny structural echo of the doomed flight at the center of it all, the film starts strong, soars high, but then loses altitude before crash landing into the end credits. By choosing to focus on a situation that’s intriguingly irreconcilable, I can’t exactly blame the filmmakers for finding a way to reconcile the film’s various strands that seems too easy and even has one particular scene that’s so bad it appears to be counter to their thematic intent. I’m just disappointed that they couldn’t find the film a landing to match the sensational takeoff. 

Rock 'Em Sock 'Em: REAL STEEL

Real Steel takes place in a time in the near future, a mere fourteen years from now, when boxing will become a sport of the past. Because of an ever increasing audience demand for carnage and destruction – the boxing equivalent of going to NASCAR for the crashes – and because of leaps and bounds in the field of robotics, boxing will be a sport for souped-up humanoid robots, controlled by their owners to beat each other until sparks and oil splatter all over the ropes. This is miles from Robot Wars a TV show from about a decade ago that sent what were essentially Roombas with rotary saws crashing into each other. The boxing of Real Steel is boxing as we know it today with the same rules and the same rings, but the athletes have gone the way of the factory worker. Instead of testing the limits of the human body, robot boxing tests the limits of cold, hard steel. It’s a wonder the crowds at these events aren’t wearing earplugs.

The film follows a down-on-his-luck, debt-burdened robot manager (Hugh Jackman) who just can’t catch a break. In the opening scene, he pulls up to a small town fair where he’s hoping to make a little money by pitting his fighter against a bull and wagering a sizable sum with the event’s promoters. Minutes later, his robot’s impaled by a horn and scattered across the arena. The promoters expect him to pay up so he skips town. As he’s escaping, he receives word that his old girlfriend has died, which leaves the eleven-year-old son (Dakota Goyo) he’s never met in need of a guardian. Pulling up to the courthouse, he convinces his ex’s sister (Hope Davis) to give him a few months with his son, just for the summer.

This seems like two disparate plotlines, but they’re drawn together when the boy shows a talent for helping his dad, and his dad’s robo-gym landlord (Evangeline Lilly), work to get their robots in fighting shape. (It’s explained away with an off-handed reference to video games, ‘cause kids like those, right?) So the working-poor underdog, a former human pugilist who has found his talent displaced and unexploited, struggling to make ends meet and turn his life around, is encouraged by his son to try one last time to make a go of robot boxing. It’s not too subtle, but I liked how the robots become metaphors through which the father and son work out their individual problems and eventually bond. But the old fighting robot has been rendered unusable by a bull’s goring, so first they need to find a ‘bot. Then, they need to get him to fight with the best of them.

It’s a testament to the power of clichés done right that the film works so well. The two appealing performances from the leads ground the proceedings in a nice, heightened Hollywood approximation of human emotion. Jackman, with plenty of big star-power charisma, and Goyo, with engaging boyish energy, play off each other well. The remarkable blend of practical and digital effects works well for the robots. The believable blending between the worlds of man and machine creates a reasonably credible, if more than a little silly, sci-fi world for what is essentially a standard boxing movie.

The movie’s screenplay comes from John Gatins who has two baseball movies, one basketball movie, and a horseracing movie to his credit. He knows just the path to set the movie on and piles up the conflict in the usual ways. The underestimated little robot the father-son duo finds, fixes, and trains works his way up the ranks. They start in gritty underground matches played against scary punks with no rules in roadside bars, dark clubs and back-alley warehouses, before they fight their way into higher stakes and bigger money. In solid sports movie fashion, the stakes grow as we charge forward to the Big Fight with a popular, scary champion with boo-worthy corporate backers. Each new match makes the widescreen spectacle all the more eye-catching with massive crowds, large stadiums, and plenty of neon lighting and pounding bass. It may be a bit predictable (when it comes to figuring out where this goes, do you need a roadmap?) but it’s also enjoyable. I found the matches just as, if not more, thrilling and involving as any of the fights in last year’s Oscar-winning boxing movie The Fighter.

The sci-fi specifics may be a little fuzzy, the characters archetypes, and the plot a compilation of sports film’s greatest moments, but Real Steel is a big pleasing popcorn movie. It’s loud and kind of dumb, but it’s also appealing, exciting, and more or less satisfying. Director Shawn Levy, he of the Cheaper by the Dozen and Pink Panther remakes and two Night at the Museum movies, has stepped out of his (bad) family-comedy comfort zone to make a comfortable big budget picture. With its warm father-son dynamic and surprisingly convincing robot effects deployed for a sturdy formula adequately told, the film has a pleasant feel. The look is glossy and confident. The pace is brisk but deliberate yet exciting. It’s a fun entertainment machine, an enjoyable couple of hours that tells a story through robots beating the living steel out of each other for characters I cared about.