Need for Speed movie reviews hit the road

Need for Speed the movie launched in the UK on 12 March to mixed reviews, with critics both criticising and complimenting the game-based silver screen adaptation.

Movie review aggregation website IMDb gave the film 7.9/10, and describes it as an action, crime-drama. Need For Speed is scheduled to premier in South Africa on 20 March.

“Fresh from prison, a street racer who was framed by a wealthy business associate joins a cross country race with revenge in mind. His ex-partner, learning of the plan, places a massive bounty on his head as the race begins.”

While the plot sounds tired and one we have seen may times before, reviewers praised the film for ditching CGI in favour of good-old-fashioned stunt driving and real car crashes.

Eurogamer said:

“Dreamworks [took a] chance to use EA’s evergreen brand to lever themselves into the cheap, dumb, and dirty world of gear-head cinema. It has a contrived plot and risible characters, leaden gags and flat melodrama, a script that is simply awful, and worst of all, it takes itself seriously.”

“Need for Speed is entertaining in spite of itself for a couple of reasons. One, it’s not a digital effects bonanza; it was all shot for real, with practical stunts in real cars. Two, it keeps its foot on the gas. This isn’t one of those racing movies that’s all montage and build-up. I don’t think you’re out of a speeding car for more than 10 of its 130 minutes at a time.”

The Verge was not very impressed either:

“NFS has turned out to be an odd pairing of a big-budget video game franchise to its mid-budget film adaptation, a dangerous equation that comes off feeling like an actual video game cutscene: lifeless, ill-conceived filler that gamers just want to skip through to get to the good parts.”

“I don’t blame the producers for spinning such a thin thread connecting this film to the video game franchise that created it; they had practically nothing to work with, after all. But in the age of Fast & Furious 6, gratuitous car porn on the big screen only works when it’s over the top in every sense of the word — and the people behind NFS appear to have had neither the money nor the imagination to pull it off.