FASTER: Bringing “Tough Guy” Back To The Multiplex

The trail­ers for Faster don’t do this film many favors.  First off, they make it look more like a car chase movie than an action movie (Your Humble Reviewer ini­tially feared that it might be a con­tin­u­a­tion of The Fast And The Furious fran­chise).  They also make the film seem like it is sim­ply a vehi­cle for Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, with Billy Bob Thornton thrown in as window-dressing for what looks to be a sim­ple one-hero story.  This is a shame because the film is much more inter­est­ing — and uncom­pro­mis­ing — than these pre­views make it seem.

As the pre­views indi­cate, Johnson plays the char­ac­ter who kick-starts the film’s story: he’s the tersely-named Driver, a for­mer wheel-man who is being released from prison as the film opens.  He imme­di­ately grabs a car and returns home to begin a mis­sion of vengeance, method­i­cally killing off the peo­ple who mur­dered his half-brother after a heist gone bad.  Seems sim­ple enough, right?

Wrong — the actions of Driver only account for one-third of the plot.  Another sec­tion of the film is ded­i­cated to the tra­vails of Cop (Thornton), a griz­zled detec­tive who’s try­ing to put his mar­riage back together as he waits out the days until his retire­ment.  He’s put on the Driver case and becomes fix­ated on it as he sizes up the sham­bles his life has become.  The remain­ing third of the plot focuses on Killer (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), an assas­sin who has been hired by an unknown party to kill Driver.  He’s los­ing inter­est in his day job because he has become seri­ous about a roman­tic rela­tion­ship.  However, he feels com­pelled to fin­ish the job.

The end result deliv­ers plenty of action — in fact, the open­ing sequences offer more excite­ment in six or eight min­utes than most mod­ern thrillers offer in their entire run­ning time — but the script has more on its mind than pulp thrills.  It owes a cer­tain debt to Kill Bill in its ini­tial setup but moves into more inter­est­ing ter­ri­tory as it explores the inner lives of its three leads.  The arche­typal char­ac­ters and plot­ting con­ceits are used to cre­ate a med­i­ta­tion on revenge, its costs and how the all-consuming obses­sion it breeds can cost the avengers and the peo­ple in their lives.

The act­ing is appro­pri­ately styl­ized to fit the existential-pulp nature of the nar­ra­tive.  Driver is writ­ten as an empty shell of a man dri­ven only by his need for revenge so Johnson appro­pri­ately plays his as a force of nature who is more scary than sym­pa­thetic.  That said, he allows him to have the occa­sional glim­mer of human­ity and does a good job of show­ing how Driver strug­gles with his mis­sion in its lat­ter phase.  Thornton is in famil­iar burn-out ter­ri­tory as Cop and he fits the role nicely, deliv­er­ing a lived-in por­trait of debauched weari­ness that instantly con­vinces. Killer is the most car­toon­ish of the char­ac­ters in con­cep­tion but Jackson-Cohen plays him with a fierce, sin­gle minded energy that makes it work.

Female char­ac­ters mostly live on the mar­gins of this macho world but Carla Gugino has some fun ban­ter with Thornton and Jennifer Carpenter deliv­ers a nice, emo­tional cameo as the only woman on Driver’s list.  That said, the big scene-stealer amongst the sup­port­ing cast is for­mer Oz reg­u­lar Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje as a crime con­spir­a­tor who has attempted to atone for his past by becom­ing a preacher.  A scene he and Johnson share near the end of the film is Faster’s dra­matic highlight.

However, the key ele­ment nec­es­sary to make a film like Faster work is the direc­tion — and thank­fully direc­tor George Tillman Jr. is up to the task.  He keys into the min­i­mal­ism of the script and goes for a styl­ish yet stark approach.  He com­bines an arid visual style with mus­cu­lar pac­ing and resists the temp­ta­tion to overdo the action scenes with too many angles and MTV edit­ing.  Instead, the action is deliv­ered in short, intensely focused bursts that hit hard thanks to their pre­cise cal­i­bra­tion (a car chase flash­back in the mid­dle of the story is par­tic­u­larly daz­zling, as is a mano-a-mano knife fight in an enclosed space).  The end results have a vis­ceral inten­sity.  Most impor­tantly, he draws out the human­ity in the script while never shy­ing away from its grim­mer elements.

In short, Faster is a sur­pris­ingly strong throw­back to the glory days of tough-guy cin­ema: specif­i­cally, the 1970’s vari­ety that sought to off­set its pyrotech­nics with well-acted explo­rations of macho themes.  It deserves credit for going this old-school route at a time when it would be eas­ier to make another tooth­less, glossy thriller.