Faster

"Faster" has got to be the slowest movie I have seen in a long time.

Ok...I know I haven't been very good with my blogging updates. I finally got enough of my thesis written that I felt I had some time to go and check out a movie. So Benjy and I picked the most mindless movie out right now...and any movie with Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson should be the most mindless thing available.

As it turns out...The Hollywood hype machine got to me. Check out the movie poster:

IMDB Page

It features a completely roided out Rock, holding a handgun and just looking plain BADASS! The word "FASTER" has a bullet flying through it for crying out loud!

Things actually start out pretty awesome. The Rock is being let out of jail...he is huge! (Seriously...how many steroids did he take to get that big?) Anyways...As he is getting out of jail we see that all the inmates hate him, the guards are afraid of him and the warden apparently feels sorry for him. He then walks out the front door, is in the middle of the desert and then proceeds to RUN all the way home...for serious...he just runs into the middle of the desert! You can't help but think he is a badass.

So he goes and picks up his sweet muscle car, drives to some office call center, goes inside without saying anything to anyone, walks up to some nerd's cubicle and proceeds to shoot him right between the eyes!!! I think to myself "This is going to be fun!"

We then cut to Billy-Bob Thornton who is some sad crack head only to discover that he is actually a cop who has been assigned the case of the nerd with the bullet between the eyes...I think to myself "Awesome...interesting twist."

Then we cut to some crazy cool house and some guy doing weird yoga stuff...Proceed to find out that he sold some computer company and got insanely rich that way. Then it is revealed that he is an assassin! I think to myself "To what places of awesomeness are you taking me movie!?!?!"

And then the wheels fell off.

This movie morphed into some strange story of revenge and redemption with each new "action" scene becoming less awesome and more "blah" intermingled with odd artsy fade outs and stupid character development. Billy Bob Thornton turns out to be a cop 10 days from retirement with drug issues. The assassin...we find out that he only charges $1 for his services because he does it as a hobby. Apparently he really IS a computer geek...which is probably why he never kills The Rock by the end of the movie.

As for the The Rock...he is on a war path for the first ten minutes. Then somebody decided that he should act for the rest of the the movie. As he continues his revenge spree, his gun hand begins to shake more and more as he becomes increasingly conflicted. Ohhhhh...a shaking hand...give him an academy award! I finally lost it when they have a close up of his face with a tear rolling down his cheek. Are you kidding me??? The Rock doesn't cry! He kicks asses! This was what frustrated me the most...the movie poster led me to believe that I was going to get an awesome, high paced, action packed thrill ride...what I actually got was a movie that started fast and then fizzled out slowly with predictable "twists" along the way. If you can't figure out that Billy Bob is the real bad guy after about 30 minutes then you probably fell asleep.

Oh whoops...SPOILER ALERT...ahhh...whatever...you wont watch this movie anyways.

I give this movie 2 tricycles out of 10 muscle cars (Tricycles are slow...muscle cars are fast...nobody???...I guess Benjy isn't the only one who needs to work on analogies)