The Best Fight Choreography of 2014

by Vanessa Tottle & Gabriel Valdez

You know what fight choreography is, we know what fight choreography is. Let’s just dive right in.

Oh, and we should warn you that unlike our other Best of 2014 articles, since fight scenes usually involve a big reveal or someone’s death:

THE MOVIE CLIPS IN THIS ARTICLE CONTAIN SPOILERS.

They won’t play without you clicking on them, but just be aware of the above if you do.

3. CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER

Chris Carnel, fight coordinator
James Young, fight choreographer

This has stunts and fight choreography across the board – car chases (although the more outlandish stuff is CG), knife fights, wire-assists – you name it, it was in the Captain America sequel.

It was a really good year for practical choreography on film, and Captain America includes much more practical work than any other Marvel film. That blending also requires a great deal of creativity on the part of the stunt and fight coordinators, who wanted something less cartoonish and more immediate and brutal.

(Read the review)

2. JOHN WICK

Jonathan Eusebio, Jon Valera, fight coordinators

Are you going to eat those mashed potatoes?

No, I’m saving them for later.

This is the attitude that permeates the creative fight choreography of John Wick. Gun fu has been around for a while, but what Keanu Reeves practices is closer to gun jutsu. He controls the nearest threat with his body, saving him for later, and deals with the furthest one or two or three. It’s completely counter-intuitive and could only work in movies, but it is downright beautiful to watch.

It completely undermines your expectations of how a fight’s going to proceed and using Keanu Reeves as its dancer, John Wick gives us martial arts movements according to a ballet philosophy.

The clip above is the conclusion to a sequence that sees Reeves fight his way through several floors of a club. Each floor has its own dance music, and the pace of the choreography changes according to each genre – slowed down and deliberate in the new age spa, frenzied and tense on the dubstep dance floor.

It’s exceptionally clever, and that’s even before mentioning the fight between Reeves and Adrianne Palicki a few scenes later, which begins like a dance and ends like a brawl.

(Read the review)

1. THE RAID 2

Iko Uwais, Yayan Ruhian, fight choreographers

Here is one of the most overlooked movies of 2014, a martial arts film that you could take every action scene out of and still be left with a compelling gang drama. And yet, those action scenes are some of the best ever filmed.

Director Gareth Evans leaves the fight scenes to his choreographers, who also play a lead and supporting character, but he still insists on using long takes that hit certain marks. The fight scenes to him are opportunities to communicate emotion in a way that’s removed from traditional storytelling. They’re filled with visual beats that lay their characters raw in a way that’s shielded during dramatic scenes.

In this clip, for instance, we already know that Hammer Girl is deaf, but when her sunglasses are knocked from her face, it’s revealed that she only has one eye. We stay on this for only a split-second, nothing is mentioned, and the fight doesn’t stop. It’s a heart-wrenching realization that suggests a whole other film’s worth of story, told in a moment, and that turns the end of a henchwoman from one character’s triumph into another’s tragedy.

This is how the film constantly communicates an anti-violence message through some of the most brutal fight choreography ever put in a movie. That’s not to say The Raid 2 doesn’t like cinematic violence. To the contrary, it basks in it, but it uses this to create a message about real-world violence and corruption in Indonesian politics.

We could talk about Iko Uwais’s tight body control and efficient movement, Yayan Ruhian’s loose, wildly animalistic performance, and how every character in the film fights completely differently, but in the end, Evans uses the choreography not as an attraction, but as one more storytelling tool to convey emotion and fill the world of his story in with detail. It has fight scenes that will make you cry. How many films can say that?

What makes the fight choreography in The Raid 2 special isn’t just the insane technical level required of the performers, it’s that the choreography itself tells vignettes inside the bigger story. The narrative doesn’t stop while we watch the fighting. As in dance, the story condenses and intensifies.

We’re always talking about how filmmakers need to invent new “cinematic language” for technical elements on film. The Raid 2 invents brand new language for fight scenes and how they can be used. It’s a rare instance when a film does that this successfully.

(Read the review)

In the lead-up to the Oscars, we’ve named several Best of 2014 Awards, with a special focus on categories the Oscars don’t include:

The Best Stuntwork of 2014

The Best 3-D of 2014

The Best Diversity of 2014

The Best Original Score of 2014

The Best Soundtrack of 2014

The Most Thankless Role of 2014

Full Vintage Keanu — “John Wick”

by Gabriel Valdez

No one knows if the Russian mob will ever recover from this last month. First Denzel, now Keanu: their habit for angering our best action stars has cost them dearly. Never before have I seen so many secret gun cabinets, gangsters shot in totally legitimate business establishments, and henchmen hit by cars drifting sideways.

In October alone, the Russian mafia has been chased out of New York City twice now, first in The Equalizer and now in John Wick. At least it’s spurred business – the aluminum bat and tire iron industries are booming, while body shops are seeing record business from the number of SUVs driven into walls or off four-story drops. Rent on storage space has skyrocketed since so many empty warehouses and shipping yards have succumbed to awesome, slow-motion explosions.

Keanu Reeves has always been the sort of action hero who can heartlessly shoot a man in the face and turn around to save a kitten in a tree without breaking our suspension of disbelief. John Wick doesn’t take things that far – instead, Keanu’s titular Wick is briefly partnered with a charming puppy, the last gift from his late wife. When the Russian mob boss’s son breaks into Wick’s house to steal his vintage car, the puppy gets in the way and…well, now Wick is out for revenge. Turns out Wick was once a top assassin, and that’s unfortunate for the Russians.

It sounds schmaltzy because it is, but Keanu plays it honestly. You can connect to his anger because he feels as if the universe has unjustly taken away what he loved most, and haven’t we all been in that place, willing to lash out at any target that presents itself?

John Wick itself is part of a 90s breed of movie I think of as gothic action, not as much for its gothic style (although this was popular) as its fatalistic worldview. These movies rely on their central actors and prioritize style over everything else. To them, the city at night is the ultimate human achievement, filled with unfeeling architecture, enough bright neon to make aging protagonists feel behind the times, and so much murder and mood that their own bloody story is just one of many. The over-the-top The Boondock Saints, a glammed out The Crow, or Keanu’s own heated, hazy debut to many Americans, Point Break, all fall into this category. These films have too short an attention span and are too aware of themselves to be noir – even the subtitles in John Wick announce themselves with colorful highlights and spill across the screen at odd angles.

Wick is exactly what you expect from the genre: simple premise, solid enough acting, and a heaping dose of cynical self-loathing. You came for the action, though, and the fight choreography is brilliant, taking advantage of Keanu’s matter-of-fact grace to create fights that are by turn balletic and brutal. The standout sequence involves Wick fighting his way through various floors of a Russian dance club. Each floor has its own mood lighting, music, and obstacles: a red-hued floor playing pop; a blue toned floor with private pools, serene new age music, and lots of glass to break; and finally a strobing dancefloor filled with unwitting civilians and dubstep. Wick fights his way through every lighting set-up and musical background as if he’s progressing through a video game (and assassins even exchange tokens for access), so you just sit back and enjoy the ride.

I’m tempted to say actors like Willem Dafoe and Adrianne Palicki are brilliant as rival assassins, but they really aren’t. They’re good, sure, but it’s more that they’re excellent stylistic fits. They understand how to strut into a fight scene and chew the scenery. Palicki, in particular, enjoys the film’s best one-on-one fight versus Keanu.

The main weakness in Wick is that it doesn’t go far enough. You keep expecting it to throw in the kitchen sink, and it teases you with characters who nearly break the movie when they begin to bait each other just for the sake of upping the ante. Just as it’s doing this, however, Wick pulls back and gives you exactly the clichéd climax you’d expect. That’s fine, but for a while, I really believed Wick was about to be far madder than what results.

The action scenes are great, the black comedy is superb, and the style reminds you that action movies once took place in dark cities during nights teeming with possibility, instead of in superspy offices and sleek corporate headquarters. John Wick and Keanu himself are refreshingly vintage. It’s rated R for violence and language, but more specifically because 99% of the movie’s population gets shot in the face at some point.

Does it Pass the Bechdel Test?

This section helps us discuss one aspect of movies that we’d like to see improved – the representation of women. Read why we’re including this section here.

1. Does John Wick have more than one woman in it?

Yes, Wick’s wife (Bridget Moynahan), a rival assassin named Perkins (Adrianne Palicki), and a bartender named Addy (the underused Bridget Regan).

2. Do they talk to each other?

Nope.

3. About something other than a man?

Nope.

(There are additional women used as eye candy in the background for the pool scene, but there are men used as eye candy in this scene, too, and the movie gets over it pretty quickly in order to squeeze in a few more guys getting shot in the face.)

Ultimately, you’ve got to hold John Wick accountable for not prioritizing its women as much as its men. Palicki is a good step in the right direction: her malevolent Perkins is treated as the biggest single threat to Wick and when they inevitably fight, they go punch for punch. It is a brutal fight scene, but so are all the others. In a movie about fight scenes, I’m glad they feature her as Wick’s equal and let her beat Keanu up a bit, rather than finding a cop-out (as many movies do) to have a dangerous woman whose only threat is her cinematic sexiness. To Perkins, feminine wiles are slower than shooting a guy in the face. Palicki is good looking, sure, but so is Keanu, and the lithe silhouette he strikes is for more obsessed over than hers.

The movie doesn’t objectify women in any real way and although Wick’s angry about the loss of his wife, he’s really getting vengeance for his super-adorable puppy. I can get behind that. The movie momentarily wants to say something about cycles of violence, but it quickly backs off this in order for more guys to – you’ll never guess – get shot in the face.

Films as stylistic as these only make their worlds seem more fully realized when they cast women in equal proportion to men. John Wick misses an easy opportunity to give viewers more room to breathe inside its cinematic world.

Trailers of the Week — Jennifer Lawrence Season

Let’s just dive straight in:

THE HUNGER GAMES: MOCKINGJAY PART 1

My worry for the Hunger Games series has been how it goes bigger, how it goes from a franchise about very orderly deathmatches to a franchise about chaotic, messy war. The series’ strength has never been its action. Its strength has been psychology. From the first moment of the first film, Hunger Games invoked the Depression-era photography of Dorothea Lange. The games were secondary, a function of presenting fashion and celebrity. They could just as easily have been a football game, or a celebrity feud on reality TV distracting us from our everyday struggle. That’s the whole point – deathmatches are just more cinematically compelling.

I remember walking out of the second Hunger Games and thinking, This is the franchise we need. This is my generation’s most complete, mass-market call for resistance. Not the kind of guns-out resistance in the movie, but a social and cultural resistance. Films like Hunger Games and this year’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier make the reality of how our nation’s evolved toward oligarchy a little easier to comprehend for many. The broadest tools for social change can’t be the sharpest – they have to be accessible in order to reach a wide audience. These are the movies that most finely balance being a blockbuster with translating social commentary.

So I worry for Mockingjay Part 1 not because I have reason to, but because maintaining that complete social comment across multiple films is a truly staggering task. In going bigger, in becoming messier, will it lose that psychological edge, that critique that makes it compelling not just on a cinematic level, but on a social and political level? It has created an opportunity event franchises just aren’t allowed. I have no doubt this film will be good, maybe even great, but it can’t just be that. It needs to be socially crucial. It needs to build exponentially on the ideas of its predecessors, like the second entry did.

The subtitle on this blog is “Movies and how they change you.” There’s a real chance The Hunger Games can not just embody that, but that it can continue to redefine the scope and scale on which event films are able to take social stands.

SERENA

Mockingjay isn’t the only Jennifer Lawrence movie to trailer this week. Serena has been held back as Lawrence’s star continues to rise (and as the studio figures out how to sell it). It would seem to re-unite her with Bradley Cooper, but this was actually shot before American Hustle.

Serena follows timber barons George and Serena Pemberton during the Great Depression as they scheme their way to power. There will be tragedy, neat costumes, and acting your face off aplenty. The trailer’s ill-defined, but Lawrence and Cooper – aside from sounding like a law firm – are enough to make it must-watch. Danish director Susanne Bier is a staple in the Oscars’ Foreign Language category, and her In a Better World won the award in 2011.

I named this one of my top 10 most anticipated films at the beginning of the year, but I’d begun to think it had been pushed once more. The release date is still in question, but it looks like October 24. Frankly, whether the film is good, bad, or indifferent, Magnolia Pictures is doing an atrocious job of advertising what should be easy money. People will go watch Jennifer Lawrence read a phone book for two hours at this point, and she’d still do it well enough to win an Oscar for Best Documentary. Put some money into advertising and get it out there.

MR. TURNER

EFFIE GRAY

Originally, the title this week was going to be “British Painter Season,” but then Mockingjay hit and, well, that was that.

In truth, I held Mr. Turner off from last week so it wouldn’t get quite as buried. The visuals of Mr. Turner look particularly striking, and I enjoy that the film appears to be as focused on his watercolour landscapes and their impact as it does on J.M.W. Turner’s personality.

Effie Gray excites me a little less, if only because the trailer makes it unclear quite what’s happening. Is Dakota Fanning secretly the painter in question, or is she the wife of the painter, or some combination thereof? The film looks like it has potential, however, and at this point, you don’t overlook a film with Fanning’s involvement (and Emma Thompson’s, for that matter).

IN ORDER OF DISAPPEARANCE

Revenge comedies are few and far between. In fact, when the Coen Brothers and Guy Ritchie aren’t applying their talents to one, all we’ve got left is Scandinavia.

Thank the gods for Stellan Skarsgard. Whether delivering the best one liners and running naked through Thor or charming and terrifying his way through The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, he’s too overlooked for his dynamic and disarming performances.

In Order of Disappearance looks like a superb vehicle to showcase his talents, and I can’t wait to see it.

JOHN WICK

You can take Keanu Reeves’ dignity. You can take Keanu Reeves’ car. But you better not lay a finger on Keanu Reeves’ dog.

That’s a message I can get on board with, and that’s the theme to this wackadoodle-meets-Euroslick trailer for John Wick. Put Nic Cage in this, and it makes Worst Trailer of the Week. Put Keanu Reeves in it, and suddenly it’s stylish as hell. Such is the power of Keanu.

A host of unexpected actors and the sheer grace Keanu possesses in the choreography they drop at the end suddenly takes this from iffy into got-to-see-it territory.

THE TOWN THAT DREADED SUNDOWN

I’m not much for slasher movies, unless you’re talking Italian giallo films from the 70s. The problem is that American slashers dropped all the psychology, opera, and art history from the genre and replaced it with torture, cheesy masks, and fear-mongering misogyny. That said, The Town That Dreaded Sundown looks like it has potential, with a small-town mystery at its center and some brilliant shots and color composition in the trailer. Then they drop in the guy with the cheesy mask and I lose all hope. Still, it’s one to keep an eye on just in case it delivers on those wonderful visuals.

Worst Trailer of the Week: MAPS TO THE STARS

This is one of my more anticipated movies this Autumn, but boy oh boy, is this an awful trailer. You’ve got to be careful cutting a David Cronenberg film for ads. His movies are composed of long stretches of quiet, of set-up, of reinforcing the mood, and sudden explosions of outright violence. That’s hard to define in a two-minute stretch, but my god, do they do a terrible job of it here. There’s a complete lack of dramatic timing in how it’s edited together.

Criticizing an Actor’s Ethnicity — How Not To Be a Critic

I recently joked about 50 Shades of Grey being the whitest movie in history. I stand by the joke, because I did my research before making it. That may seem like overkill just to make a one-off joke, but please don’t be mistaken. First off, I live, eat, & breathe research, and it’s as much a critique as a joke. Secondly, there’s at least another six months before 50 Shades comes out, and I plan on milking that joke at least a dozen more times.

There’s a lot of responsibility that goes into being a critic…Scratch that – there’s a lot of responsibility that SHOULD go into being a critic, but doesn’t always. Anyone can make a mistake – the best critics will make analytical mistakes because they’re regularly breaking new ground. Any critic, good or bad, will make a factual error from time-to-time because of the amount of information he or she has to deal with.

Making ethnic claims to which you don’t possess the information, however, doesn’t belong in the business. Period. An acquaintance of mine, cosplayer, costume designer, and model Zoe Flood (aka Miss Macross), was recently criticized in this Magnetic Mag article for her appearance in a Porter Robinson music video. What do they say is wrong with her? They separate her from the four Asian actresses in the video by criticizing the inclusion of “four Asian girls and one white girl (in Asian face).”

There are two problems with this critique. One: this is a music video, so let’s refer to them as actresses, not “girls.” Two: that white actress who’s so insultingly made up to look Asian? Just so happens to be Asian.

While I somewhat agree with the article’s broader message (particularly as it applies to Avril Lavigne’s music video debacle earlier this year), you can’t make baseless assertions about actors’ ethnic lineage without having the information at hand. This is only the most recent example on my own personal radar of this kind of lax criticism.

One of our writers, actress S.L. Fevre, consistently runs into challenges regarding her Brazilian heritage. She’s viewed as “acting too American” and has been told she was “more of a Mexican shade” by a producer who later revealed he didn’t even know where Brazil is.

I joke about an ex-girlfriend once telling me, “You’re the whitest Mexican I know,” but I’ve had employers insist I’m lying about my ancestry simply because I’m tall and white and “don’t act Mexican.” Instead of – what? – wearing a poncho and hurling tacos your way while eying up your daughters with a hand on my six-shooter? First, go talk to a psychiatrist. That’s way too Freudian and you need to get out more. (Totally flattered though.) Second, and more to the point, we’ve developed a nasty habit of criticizing the ethnic backgrounds of actors based on gross visual stereotypes before we have the information.

In the last year, criticisms that an American like Keanu Reeves shouldn’t be playing an Asian in (the somewhat underrated) 47 Ronin had me burying my head in my hands. First off, he’s Canadian, not American. Secondly, the guy’s half Pacific Islander, which connotes a mishmash of mainland ancestries that you’d need genetic testing to pick apart. Besides, complaints like these ignore the really scary lesson in all this: Canadian Shakespeare’s two most lasting exports are Reeves and William Shatner. What the hell are they doing to the Bard up there?

Johnny Depp was criticized for playing Tonto in The Lone Ranger. His ethnic claim to playing a Comanche character was questioned, even though he was cited as having Cherokee lineage and was adopted by the Comanche, who supported the film’s biting critique of the genocides on which our country was founded. Critics of all different ethnic backgrounds claimed it was a disgrace to original Tonto actor Jay Silverheels. Here’s the rub: Silverheels was Mohawk, an Ontario nation that lived as far from the southwestern Comanche as you could without leaving the continent. The two nations likely never dealt with each other. You know what’s insulting? Conflating hundreds of different cultures and ancestries into a single equivalency. It’s the critic’s version of saying, “They all look the same to me.”

Screw that.

Might a fully Japanese actor or a Comanche actor have been more appropriate for those roles? Perhaps. But that hardly justifies critics so lazy in their research that they’ll misrepresent actors and entire cultures in order to pretend they know something they don’t.

At least Reeves, Depp, and actors like them are largely immune to critical ignorance. Actors starting out, however, are not. Angry claims of inappropriate misrepresentation can carry weight when you’re just starting out. So unless Magnetic Mag‘s writer Yosh had specific information, and had spoken with the actors themselves about their ethnicity, there is no place in criticism to make a claim like he did.

When you’re a critic, there’s a temptation to act like you know everything that relates to the movie industry. It’s easy to fall into – the people around you expect this. The easiest way to shoot yourself in the foot, however, is to buy into that. What’s my own opinion in relation to Yosh’s argument about Porter Robinson’s misuse of Japanese fashion? Frankly, I don’t know enough about Porter Robinson, and I don’t know enough about the cultural themes in Japanese fashion. Perhaps the music video’s costume and wardrobe stylist, Elleanor Yamaguchi, could have shed some light on this had Yosh bothered to interview her. (See what I did there? Research.)

Admit what you don’t know, research what you can. Don’t write articles based on information you don’t have, and if you call out a specific creative talent on something factual, make damn sure you’ve actually bothered to glance at those facts.

Before I hand you over to our resident East Asian media expert, Vanessa Tottle, for an educated analysis on the fashion in “Lionhearted,” let me encourage you to check out Zoe’s website. She is one of the better cosplayers out there – she featured as a costume designer on Call to Cosplay, an enjoyably lo-fi series from Myx TV that actually gets into the design and fabrication processes. She’s also appeared in SyFy’s Heroes of Cosplay.

Here’s Vanessa:

The same way military surplus, leather jackets, mohawks, and even flannel became exaggerated fashion statements of rebellion, kawaii (a very broad term that loosely translates as “cute” or “lolita”) fashion has been co-opted for counter-culture use across Eastern Asia. “Lionhearted” uses kawaii elements to criticize American ‘sameness’ and the pressure to constrain your behavior, image, and worldview to other people’s expectations.

My favorite recent twist in re-purposing kawaii is in Korean band F(x)’s wonderful “Red Light” – it combines steampunk, riot gear and cute aegyo fashion to rally their fan base against the bureaucratic policies, corporate lobbying, and corruption that have neutered South Korea’s government from being responsive to suffering and tragedy among its own people.

Turning mainstream fashion into a counter-culture message is nothing new. David Fincher did it to the power dynamic between business suits and lingerie in Madonna videos. Mike Nichols did it with event dress – suits, evening wear, and famously a bridal gown – as far back as The Graduate.

Just about the time when the West successfully figured out how to assimilate punk and grunge into lifestyle elements it could sell, the East took the fashion that already sold well and turned it into a punk-styled movement of its own.

I dislike Yosh’s idea of ‘misappropriating’ such a post-modern fashion. ‘Kawaii’ is the broadest term to use, but its Japanese origins shouldn’t confuse: kawaii belongs to online communities more than a single nation or culture. Kawaii crosses borders between countries that don’t even speak the same language: South Korea and China have contributed much, while kawaii’s origins lie as much in the American goth movement and stylized, Victorian-era fashions as they do in anything Japanese. Over the years, it’s adopted cyberpunk, steampunk, and most recently post-apocalyptic elements from the United States as well.

Yosh’s article belies an inaccurate belief that kawaii has spread solely as an immutably mainstream, culturally Japanese movement to which Western artists have no input or creative right. This is false – kawaii’s popularity is driven by grassroots, online, and DIY communities both Asian and American. It’s clear as day “Lionhearted” itself is firmly rooted in the fashion’s counter-culture themes.

Great Action, Lousy Plot — “Need for Speed”

Need for Speed is a movie about illegal street racing that follows a convoluted story of revenge. Simple developments are over-explained while gaping plot holes are casually swept under the rug. Its story is not told well. So the movie is bad, right?

Not so fast. The stuntwork is top of the line, ranging from straight-up racing and dazzling crashes to 80 mph refuels and taking “riding shotgun” too literally. The stunts are all practical, meaning that professional stunt drivers actually performed them in real cars. None are created by CGI. This lends Need for Speed a breakneck energy that only the very best action movies can rival. And what else do you go see a movie about street racing for, if not the stunts? So the movie is a success, right?

Need for Speed is neither good nor bad. Every scene in a car or following one is superb. Every scene with feet planted firmly on ground drags. Since the movie splits its time half-and-half, it alternately demands and loses your attention. Most of the non-road moments are dealt with early on, so if you can make it through a lengthy setup, the payoff is worth it.

Tobey is a street racer who runs a failing garage for high-end cars. His old rival, Dino, is now a successful racer who is married to Tobey’s ex. Tobey is played by Aaron Paul (Breaking Bad) whose pathos makes up for Dominic Cooper (Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter) playing Dino as so unabashedly evil that I’m disappointed he never gets to nefariously twirl a mustache. Dino hires Tobey to finish building a legendary Ford Mustang, but the two can’t set their rivalry aside. Instead of splitting the sale, they race for the entire pot of $2.7 million. The race ends tragically: Tobey is sent to prison for a vehicular murder that Dino commits.

It’s difficult to feel too bad for Tobey, however. We’re introduced to him nearly driving over a homeless man during a race. The movie plays it for laughs – he only runs over the man’s worldly possessions. Hilarious, right? During Tobey and Dino’s race, Tobey is forced into oncoming traffic. It’s exciting, yet our hero is running innocent commuters off the road and causing high-speed collisions. Even if Tobey’s conviction isn’t precisely on the money, it’s hard to feel as if he doesn’t deserve it.

The Fast and Furious franchise at least has the good sense to couch its disaster-filled car chases in Robin Hood-style robberies of dictators and gangsters. This gives us the excuse that all the senseless collateral damage is about the greater good, not some individual racer’s ego. The saving grace of Need for Speed is that this cast pushes through it all with so much bright-eyed vigor that it’s infectious. This is in large part due to Imogen Poots. She plays Julia, a luxury car expert who becomes Tobey’s romantic interest. It’s easy to root for Paul and Poots, who really look like they’re having fun, rather than the scummy characters they play.

Most of the film takes place after Tobey’s release from prison. He races cross-country to join the DeLeon, a mythical race put on by Monarch. Other characters keep insisting nobody knows who Monarch is, even though he’s a billionaire, hosts an internet show that consists of a close-up of his own face, and seems to have given his super-secret home phone number to every single person on Earth. It’s OK, because in the long history of characters whose existence in their own movies makes no sense, there is one actor who’s made this nonsense his specialty – Michael Keaton (RoboCop). He pulls off Monarch with the heated, nonstop ADD of a veteran actor who’s having the time of his life slumming it in a B-movie.

Why will winning the DeLeon give Tobey his revenge? It’s never said, but it’s worth a lot of money. Dino is kind enough to provide a reason by joining the DeLeon at the last second. He also leaves evidence of Tobey’s wrongful conviction and his own guilt unprotected on his computer’s desktop, where his wife can access it in approximately 10 seconds. Maybe he’s not such a bad guy, after all.

Few films achieve the cosmic balance between good and bad that Need for Speed does. In a way, it reminds me of the bus from the 90’s Keanu Reeves movie Speed. The infectious acting and stuntwork are enough to keep you on board. Any dialogue taking place under the speed limit, however, and the plot explodes. Need for Speed is rated PG-13 for disturbing crashes, nudity, and language.