Fresh out of the slammer, a wrongly-convicted street racer (Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul) pushes the pedal to the metal in a fuel-injected cross-country quest to avenge his friend’s death at the hands of a rival driver (Dominic Cooper). Based on the series of video games, Need for Speed is a gear-head’s cinematic dream of high-octane action, with stuntman-turned-director Scott Waugh eschewing Hollywood’s standard CGI overload to impressively use fast cars, real drivers and practical stuntwork for the spectacular chase sequences.
“This is cinema reduced or distilled to its purest definition, of movies that move” – Richard Corliss, TIME Magazine
“Need For Speed manages to capture that ineffable car movie poetry, freedom and death commingling in the image of a single airborne wreck.” – Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, AVClub
