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Faster
| Released |
25 March 2011 |
| Director |
George Tillman |
Starring
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Dwayne Johnson, Billy Bob Thornton, Oliver Jackson-Cohen, Mauricio Lopez, Tom Berenger |
| Writer(s) |
Tony Gayton, Joe Gayton |
Producer(s)
|
Martin Shafer, Liz Glotzer, Tony Gayton, Robert Teitel |
| Origin |
United States |
| Running Time |
98 minutes |
| Genre |
Action, crime, drama |
| Rating |
16 |
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Fasten your seatbelts.
Faster is a revenge flick starring the preposterously muscled Dwayne Johnson as a man known only as Driver. Recently released from prison, he is out to exterminate the group of ne’er do wells who murdered his brother in a stick up following a bank raid. The prototype for this genre is Michael Winner’s 1974 film Death Wish but rather than taking its cue from the seventies, director George Tillman Jr. (whose most recent work was the rap biopic Notorious) is channelling that great ‘70s revivalist Quentin Tarantino. His influence is overt in the fetishising of the American muscle car, the dramatic slow motion shots accompanied by rock music and the grainy, de-saturated colour palette. Faster is an homage to an homage then; and suitably, it ends up a little watered down.
Dwayne Johnson may be built like a tank but he cannot match the ruthlessness of Charles Bronson’s vigilante in Death Wish or even Uma Thurman’s The Bride (Kill Bill). Over the course of the film in fact, Driver turns into a New Man kind of vigilante as the film becomes increasingly more unsure about its moral viewpoint. Driver’s victims get progressively more difficult to kill as guilt starts to come into the equation. The list of victims begins with an anonymous office drone and a paedophile- both framed as satisfying and justifiable kills but things get a little muddy as Driver moves on to guys who seem to have gotten their life back on track, culminating in a born again Christian minister. In effect, a man who begins the film as an unstoppable killing machine suddenly grows a conscience. As a result, it all becomes a little less fun.
Despite this confusion, Faster is still quite entertaining and as befits its name, it rarely pauses for breath and chugs along satisfyingly. Supporting turns to flesh out the action come from Billy Bob Thornton as a suitably sleazy dope-addicted cop (who could have been lifted wholesale from any of Tarantino’s movies) and a multi-millionaire, part-time hitman knows as Killer (Oliver Jackson-Cohen). It’s all quite silly of course and has an ending that can easily be predicted within the first five minutes but as a guilty pleasure it works perfectly well.
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Linda O’Brien |
