EA’s racing franchise will see the release of its first major motion picture tomorrow with the release of Need for Speed, directed by Scott Waugh and starring Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul as a street racer out for revenge. Unsurprisingly, it’s already garnered negative reviews – a quick look at the film’s Metacritic score shows a 37 out of 100 rating, indicating a very negative reaction.
While some of the more average reviews have praised Paul’s performance, the majority of them agree on the film’s utter lack of intelligent scripting, inability emulate The Fast and The Furious franchise while establishing its own unique identity and relatively poor performances of the side-characters. One reviewer felt that the script wasn’t “so much typed as button-mashed.”
The overall box office performance may tell a different story – it IS Need for Speed after all and there are a fair number of individuals who will hop on to a fast cars movie, regardless of how hopelessly bad it is. Stay tuned for the initial weekend box office results.