Masand: 'Faster' is unbelievably silly

Cast: Dwayne Johnson, Billy Bob Thornton

Director: George Tillman Jr

Faster is the kind of blood-splattered revenge film that doesn't bother with such niceties as character names. So Dwayne Johnson is introduced to us as Driver, an ex-con who, on his release from prison after 10 years, finds a car hidden for him in a junkyard, and goes hunting down the men who killed his brother in a bank heist-gone-wrong. As he takes down his enemies one by one, shooting them squarely in the head, he discovers he has a detective on his trail. Billy Bob Thornton is Cop, who with his hot female partner (played by Carla Gugino) must try to figure out Driver's next potential victim, and stop the crime before it's committed. Also in pursuit of Driver is an assassin we know as Killer, a pretty-boy British millionaire (played by Oliver Jackson-Cohen), who takes hit jobs because he's bored!

This unbelievably silly film is actually an extended chase sequence between these three characters; and expectedly the relentless shoot-outs are meant to make up for the absence of a script. Unfortunately the action isn't compelling enough to take your mind off the film's dozen other flaws.

Like the bizarre subplot involving Killer, who is a professional hit-man for free. We first see him practising what looks like a blend of martial arts and break-dancing, and apparently he's the only guy in the world who can perform those deadly moves. At one point he declares to his girlfriend: "I've won, I've beaten yoga." At least one character in Faster has a drug addiction problem, although I suspect the writers of this film may have been smoking something while dishing out this drivel!

Dwayne Johnson, who ditches the family-friendly turf he'd cornered with films like The Tooth Fairy and Race to Witch Mountain, proves why they call him The Rock. In this film, he resembles a slab of granite - solid and strong, but completely expressionless. As a cold-blooded killing machine, he has presence in the action scenes, but not enough to make this ridiculous film any less intolerable!

I'm going with one-and-a-half out of five for Faster. Even for action-movie fans, this one's a tough slog. Watch it only if you enjoy scene after scene in which bullets pierce people's heads. Of course, if you do enjoy that, you might want to get your own head checked first!

Rating: 1.5 / 5

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