As a videogame to movie adaptation, Need for Speed is successful. But that videogame tie in also what holds the movie back from being really great. There’s a lot of try-hard to be cool dialog that can be hard to put up with and an overall goofy tone that takes away from the experience.

In my typical review framing, I’ll talk about what I liked the most. It’s a great looking and sounding movie. Kinetic and clean direction, eye catching cinematography with gorgeous cars and locations. I really appreciate and admire all of the practical car stunt driving with the added CG to sweeten things up a bit. The races and action scenes are a blast to watch.

They pulled a lot of visuals right from the game, the final race travels through many of the locations that you blast through in some of the videogames recent releases. The movie gets the feel of the games and runs with it. Which is also it’s biggest problem.

The movie is basically a revenge picture with all around good guy Tobey vs the colossal jerk Dino. The drama is all set up with Tobey being the underdog with his lovable (and talkative) friends surrounding him. They always rally around their friend to help him out. The driving in the Need for Speed games is really amped up stuff with cops, planes, helicopters, barricades and a pack of drivers in the most exotic cars on earth trying to run you off the road. They transfer all of that into the movie so airplanes and choppers constantly appear out of nowhere. The way drivers get messages and the GUI of the pause screen is almost directly lifted from the games into the movie too. It’s hard to take anything seriously…a lot like a Michael Bay movie.

There’s nothing truly bad about Need for Speed, it just goes through the motions. The plot is nothing special and the characters are nothing special. I think car nuts will really like the action scenes as those are done really well and what Need for Speed is for anyway. It’s one of those movies that you don’t seek out, but if you see it on HBO, you’ll check out because you have nothing better to do.