It’s a strange world we live in, when all our hopes for a good video game movie are resting on the shoulders – or rather, the fenders – of Need for Speed.
There have been over two dozen high-profile movies based on a video game to date – many more if you include films made in Japan – but most of them have tanked. Even more of them have sucked. Even the most successful video game movie franchise, Resident Evil, is widely disregarded as non sequitor action/horror nonsense, good for an afternoon of smoking pot and eating Cheetos and ogling Milla Jovovich and not much else.
It didn’t help that the genre started with Super Mario Bros., an adaptation of a bizarre video game about plumbers saving princess, jumping on turtles, eating magic mushrooms and also talking to mushrooms who repeatedly blueball the mysterious hero. Mario may be one of the best known video game characters, but what is his character? He’s a plumber stuck in a fantasy world, perpetually rescuing a perpetually kidnapped princess and doing weird shit with dinosaurs. That’s not much of a framework on which to base a movie, and although The Super Mario Bros. Movie has its fans, at its best it’s more of a testament to studio madness than a quality motion picture with an involving story or relatable characters.
More high-profile duds followed: Street Fighter: The Movie was childish junk (although it too has its defenders), Wing Commander was swiftly swiftboated and then forgotten, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within is a notorious bomb, and the less said about Uwe Boll the better. Mortal Kombat and Silent Hill are probably the best we’ve gotten so far, and both of them are simplistic entertainments with lip-service to plot and more attention paid to style and violence. Not that there’s anything terribly wrong with that, simplistic entertainments can be just fine, but they did little to legitimize what we must hesitantly call a “genre.” (Are book adaptations a genre? Are comic book adaptations really a genre, even though there’s a big difference between the content and craft of Amazing Spider-Man and Blue is the Warmest Color?)
Most of these live-action video game movies are shuffled out into the world as b-movies, genre fluff made to placate the fanbase (that never happens). A few attempts have been made to turn a video game into, if not a serious motion picture, at least a serious blockbuster contender; films that attempted to capture the attention of mainstream audiences, all four quadrants of them. And these have been the highest-profile failures of all, and the films that – whether or not they made money – have come to represent the failure of video games to inspire quality cinema. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider had the potential, it seemed, to carve out a niche in the hearts and minds of audience members who never played a video game in their lives, but that didn’t happen. Both franchises are dead, although Tomb Raider made enough money to warrant one sequel (that one bombed).
But what many of those failed attempts at a franchise had in common was that they were based on video games with a story and characters. Maybe not terribly complicated stories, and generally not very complicated characters, but they provided filmmakers with at least a basic framework on which to make a movie. It didn’t help that many of those plots and characters were third-generation xeroxes of movies to begin with, and it didn’t help either that the few video games that did have original conceits were bastardized on their way to the screen (Alone in the Dark, Silent Hill and Resident Evil being the ur examples).
And so with Need for Speed we seem to be back to square one: all the hopes of video game movie enthusiasts, or wannabe enthusiasts at least, are now placed on an adaptation of a video game with no plot to speak of, from talent that remains largely untested. Director Scott Waugh’s only previous film credit was the moderately successful yet critically demolished Act of Valor, and even that film he co-directed, so it’s hard to tell how much credit he deserves one way or the other. The film’s star, Aaron Paul, is the award-winning co-star of one of the most celebrated TV series of all time, “Breaking Bad,” but Need for Speed is his first starring role in a wide-release motion picture. Will audiences accept him outside of the now iconic character he created on TV, or will he suffer from George Reeve Syndrome, and be permanently stuck in the minds of the masses as Jesse Pinkman? Given how Pinkman turned out at the end of the “Breaking Bad” finale, it even occurred to many that Need for Speed almost looks like a direct – albeit incongruously action-oriented – sequel to the AMC show.
Are we being foolish, or does the freedom to turn Need for Speed – a straight-up racing game with more emphasis on a wide variety of cars than any sort of narrative or anything resembling a cast of characters – into any kind of movie at all finally free a video game movie into something with the potential, at least, to evoke the immediacy of the video game experience but a narrative that’s free to work as a feature film without constantly referencing elements of the game that may not have any place in a motion picture?
We’ll find out when Need for Speed opens in theaters on March 14, 2014. In the meantime, watch the trailer below and check out CraveOnline’s post-production set visit for Aaron Paul’s thoughts on the Need for Speed movie.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
