As you will have guessed, the film is an adaptation of the popular racing video game series released by EA. The trailer starts as Tobey Marshall (Paul) is released from prison, and cuts to shots of a street race, where his voice-over explains the death of a friend, and the reason he went to prison. He gets together with his friends, but it’s not long before he wants revenge. The group assemble a plan to make sure that their enemy (Dominic Cooper), whose name is never revealed in the trailer, goes away for life. The rest of the trailer is simply shots of fast cars, as well as Cooper announcing he’ll award 6 million dollars to anyone who can take Marshall down. Cut to more shots of fast cars crashing, as well as Marshall carrying the body of a woman (Presumably Imogen Poots) away from the wreckage. Next up, a police chase, whilst we hear his friend tell him he’s wanted in 10 states, as Marshall defiantly claims “I’m never gonna stop”. Marshall confronts Cooper, saying “We’ll settle this behind the wheel”. Return to more shots of fast cars and crashes, before the trailer ends as Marshall loses his opponent as he drives off a cliff whilst attached to a helicopter.
If you’ve seen the first trailer that came out, you’ll know that this one shows the more generic action film side of it, as the first trailer included a very dramatic monologue from Aaron Paul, placed over shots from the film. The film looks very OTT, and as I mentioned earlier, in the same vein of the Fast and Furious films. Now, that’s not a bad thing. The series has it’s haters but the F&F franchise is full of incredibly decent action films, packed to the brim with excitement, even if they are unrealistic and cheesy as hell, not to mention they make a lot of money. So anyone who enjoys that has no reason to miss out on this one. One problem it has though is that you can see that it has some very serious plot elements, but much like F&F, these will be shoved over by viewers who can only pay attention to the cars. The plot is very interesting, and is the one thing that stops from being completely generic.
I have never played the Need for Speed games, so in terms of plot, I’m not entirely sure what the film offers to players. However, for action film fans, this is a must see, though I can see a lot of people steering away from this one....