Well, "back on track" may not be the right term. After all, his family films have all been moderate successes. But his rare forays into the action genre have struggled at the box office. But all he needed was the right project to turn it all around and show the world that he's got what it takes to blow shit up with style (and a witty one-liner) on the silver screen.
Faster is not that movie.
We're introduced to Dwayne Johnson's "Driver" in a series of sweaty extreme close-ups as he paces around his prison cell. He's due to be released after spending ten years in prison for his role in an armed robbery involving his late brother. Tom Berenger shows up long enough to justify his pay check (I assume a six pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon) as the prison warden, showing Driver (and us) a series of photos of all of the people our bulky anti-hero wrecked in the pokey.
This is an obvious attempt to illustrate how badass Driver really is. If you get in his way, he'll tear you apart. As soon as Driver's thrown out of prison, he starts running through the desert. A little like Forrest Gump, only this film's protagonist isn't some zen-like simple-minded dude wandering the earth, falling into events of historical signifigance and imparting a little homespun wisdom. No, Driver wants no part of all that. He just wants to shoot people.
So Driver runs and runs and runs, until he reaches a junkyard and finds a sweet 1971 Chevelle waiting for him underneath a tarp. He jumps in and drives off, tearing ass through the American southwest with vengeance on his mind.
You see, ten years ago Driver was the wheelman in a bank job orchestrated by his brother. After some fancy driving that mostly involved driving around in circles in a crowded intersection, our crafty wheelman evades the police, and the robbers escape with the loot. But all is not right in the world, because shortly after our boys pull off the crime of the week, they're held hostage in their own home by a bunch of very armed, very angry dudes.
Driver spills the beans, giving the assailants the location of the money they stole because he thinks this information will save his brother's life. Spoiler alert: big brother gets his throat slit ten seconds later. Then Driver gets shot in the back of the head for being so cooperative. Driver is clinically dead for something like 30 minutes before he miraculously recovers at the hospital, sitting up like the Undertaker after you think he's down for the count. The back of his pulverized skull is replaced with a metal plate, and he's shipped off to prison.
Back in the present, Driver's tooling around bat country, tracking down and shooting everybody who had anything to do with his brother's murder. This obviously draws the attention of the police, because the recently paroled Driver has made no effort to conceal his identity. We're introduced to "Cop", played by Billy Bob Thornton, who is partnering up with Detective Cicero (Carla Gugino) to bring Driver to justice.
Cop loves his estranged, former C.I. wife (Moon Bloodgood, one of the worst actresses in the world). He loves his chubby, baseball-impaired son. He also loves heroin. That's right: Cop is complicated. This shady motherfucker is hiding something, and only the most brain-damaged members of the audience will be unable to guess what his secret is.
Then we meet the third member of our film's hate triangle, Killer (some dude). Killer used to be some kind of crippled software genius who made a shitload of money doing something or other. Then he got bored, got surgery, and became a muscular assassin with a sexy girlfriend. Some anonymous person (any guesses?) finds Killer's number in the yellow pages, calls him up and hires him to kill Driver. So now Driver's under fire from both sides.
There's some action, some marriage proposals, some Jennifer Carpenter, and a whole lot of psuedo-religious talk of Heaven and Hell. Then the film reaches its climax at a makeshift church down by a beach, where Driver confronts the "last" of the people involved in his brother's murder. This final target (played by the guy with the insanely long name who played Mr. Eko in Lost) has been wracked with guilt since that fateful day, and has become a preacher, dedicating his life to helping others.
Driver confronts him on the beach, they share a few words about God and redemption, then the preacher drops to his knees, singing an appalling rendition of "John the Revelator", punctuated with exclamations like "Praise Jesus!" and "Lord Have Mercy!". Apparently Driver is so confused by this bizarre behavior that he chooses to spare the preacher's life, thinking he suffers from epilepsy.
So Driver wanders off, finding peace and quiet in the family picnic tent that the preacher turned into his ministry headquarters. Killer shows up and threatens to kill Driver. Then he changes his mind, because he realizes that he's bored with the assassin game, and wants to try the family thing with his gun-toting girlfriend for a while.
Then Cop ambles into the tent and shoots Driver in the back of the head. Oh noes!!! That's right, kiddies! Cop was the man who orchestrated the home invasion that led to the death of Driver's brother. It turns out that all of the people involved with the incident (all of the people Driver killed) used to be informants for Cop, and his weird, boring, junkie wife used to be Driver's brother's girlfriend. Apparently, she was boning Cop on the side, and told loverboy all about the robbery and the money and blah blah blah...
After Cop shoots Driver in the back of the head (again), he takes a leisurely stroll down the beach, talking to his treacherous broad on the phone. Surprise! Driver, who is very not dead, shoots Cop in the back. He had a metal plate in the back of his head, for Pete's sake! Why didn't Cop know that? As Cop bleeds out on the sand, he mumbles something about how he's made his own Hell, then he checks out. If you, as a member of the audience, didn't see any of that coming, then you are too stupid to live.
So Detective Cicero shows up late (as usual), puts the pieces together as she stares at Cop's junkie corpse, then just kinda shrugs. Then we see Driver tearing ass down the highway as the narrative ends and the credits roll.
That's Faster in a nutshell. It's a relatively short experience, clocking in around 92 minutes without credits. It's a bloody and entertaining film for the most part, although it is dreadfully dumb. Most of the dialogue sounds clunky and unrealistic, and the religious undertones in the film tend to fall flat. Luckily, Dwayne Johnson's character is played mostly mute, so he rarely has the chance to recite any of the insipid dialogue.
Unfortunately, the flashback sequence that reveals the tragic fate of his big brother contains some of the most awkward acting I've seen in a theatrical motion picture this year. And the main culprit in this scene happens to be Dwayne Johnson. I understand the purpose of the scene, because this takes place before Driver has become the hardened instrument of vengeance we meet at the beginning of the film, but it doesn't really work.
Johnson attempts to sound like a concerned little brother, but he really sounds like Lenny in "Of Mice And Men". The scene isn't supposed to be funny, but I laughed.
My real problem with the film rests squarely on the shoulders of two characters: "Killer" and Detective Cicero. My beef: they're worthless. If these characters were excised entirely from the script, it wouldn't matter at all. They serve no purpose whatsoever.
Killer is hunting Driver throughout the entire film. He even shoots Driver in the neck at one point, nearly killing him. Then at the end of the movie, Driver refuses to even raise his gun, saying he has no reason to shoot Killer. Are you fucking kidding me? He shot you in the neck thirty minutes earlier! You have every reason to kill this British asshole! But no, he refuses to fight, so Killer loses interest and fucks off to go get married to Maggie Grace.
There is no reason for this character to exist in the film. He accomplishes nothing. And all of the time the movie wastes following this douchebag as he chases Dwanye Johnson could have been better spent fleshing out some of the other characters in the film. Like Detective Cicero. Once again, here is a character that serves no real purpose in the story. She's a good cop. She thinks Billy Bob's a washed-up has-been. And that's it. She figures out the truth behind her partner's involvement in the bloody events that are unfolding, but only at the end of the film, after Driver's revenge spree is finished and Billy Bob is dead on the beach.
She doesn't even get an obligatory confrontation with Driver at the film's climax, where she may or may not let him "escape" because she finally understands the purpose behind Driver's long weekend of carnage. Now that would have been a cliché, but at least it would have given her something to do in this film. I'm a big Carla Gugino fan, and I hate to complain whenever I see her on the big screen (she's hot! haw haw!!), but her character in Faster should have been removed from the script.
It's like the writers had no faith in the simple story they came up with involving one man's mission of revenge and the crooked cop who's hunting him down, and felt it necessary to pad the script with pointless characters and irrelevant B plots. Perhaps if Tony and Joe Gayton were more talented, they would have realized that sometimes a simpler story is better.
On the positive side, both Dwayne Johnson and Billy Bob Thornton are good in their respective roles. Billy Bob seems to enjoy playing lowlife degenerates. He even has a funny and surprisingly touching moment with his son involving the kid's little league baseball game. And Johnson knows how to play a (mostly) silent, brooding killer. There's no finesse to his revenge killings in the film, and I found that oddly refreshing. He just wants to shoot these assholes and get on with his day. And he's got a killer icy stare.
Director George Tillman, Jr., who also directed Men Of Honor, another film I really enjoy, did a fine job with the script he was given. He manages to put together a pretty slick and entertaining film despite some of the shit the writers saddled him with. And the music is great, both the licensed songs and the score by Clint Mansell. I liked the music so much, I went out and bought the soundtrack. That's a rousing endorsement.
I have some real problems with Faster, but I still enjoyed the film. I hardly felt ripped off as I exited the theatre and walked out into the cold night air. It's nowhere near the worst film I've seen on my birthday. But it's not the film that's going to help Dwayne Johnson become a bonafide action star. The box office has spoken on this film.
I've got my fingers crossed for Fast Five...
P.S. - A review of Tron: Legacy, as well as a special week of holiday-related posts are on the way. Consider it all my gift to you, Dear Imaginary Reader.
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