075 – Need for Speed (2014)

The Fast and Furious franchise is a triumph in disposable summer entertainment; the most recent entry was my eighth favorite movie of 2013. The series began a little too self-serious, the way that most action movies tend to. But eventually the filmmakers realized that they weren’t making high art, which ironically lifted the quality of their output. Those films stopped being about racing a long time ago, rightly choosing instead to focus on the superhero Vin Diesel has become both on- and off-screen. Need for Speed attempts to fill that racing-based void, while trying to capitalize on the established films’ popularity. Early box office reports don’t look good for a potential franchise, but that is not necessarily indicative of the film itself.