I wasn't a fan of the first The Fast and the Furious movie in 2001, but a funny thing happened on the long road to next year's Fast & Furious 7: the franchise got much, MUCH better. I bring this up in my Need for Speed review, because it's obvious DreamWorks is hoping to attach a cinematic franchise to this popular video game brand, driven by one of the hottest young actors in town. Here's the thing. While Need for Speed does have some problems, it provides enough of a frame from which to build a super-car franchise upon, not unlike Vin and Paul's first go-round as Dom and Brian.

The odd thing is, Fast and Furious' franchise was spawned from the unlikeliest of places, a 1998 Vibe magazine article entitled Racer X by Ken Lin, which chronicles a group of real-life street racers in New York. Speaking of unlikely franchise roots, Need for Speed is based on a video game, albeit an extremely popular one, but the words video game and movie franchise never go hand in hand. What got me initially excited about this adaptation was that writers/brothers John and George Gatins could basically creative a narrative from scratch, since the game features literally no story line. However, while I ultimately enjoyed the characters they created, the story has its fair share of awkward and unoriginal moments.

The story centers on Tobey Marshal (Aaron Paul), who used to be a promising racer but now runs the garage handed down to him by his later father in upstate New York. On the opposite end of the spectrum is Tobey's rival Dino Brewster (Dominic Cooper), who raced on the professional circuit and now owns a high-end auto dealership. To put it much more succinctly than the movie does, Dino offers Tobey a huge job to build a $2 million car, he accepts, the car is amazing, Tobey oversteps his bounds during the sale, Dino gets pissed off, a race happens, a tragedy occurs, someone dies and Tobey gets framed and set to jail for two years. Upon Tobey's release, he hatches a plan to drive from New York to San Francisco in just a few short days (a.k.a. Vanishing Point on crack/steroids) to enter the elite DeLeon Race and get his revenge on the duplicitous Dino. He enlists the help of Julia Maddon (Imogen Poots), the woman who bought Tobey's custom Mustang, and his gearhead buddies Benny (Scott Mescudi), who serves as Tobey's eye in the sky, Finn (Rami Malek) and Joe (Ramon Rodriguez) in this race to... well, get to another race.

There certainly is plenty that could have been trimmed from the meaty 130-minute runtime. For instance, there is a running bit where Benny keeps insisting that everyone calls him Maverick, which is essentially a modified version of Seth Green's "call me Napster" gag in The Italian Job, and this helicopter-Mustang transport scene you've likely seen in the trailers, which is essentially a different version of the helicopter-bus scene in Swordfish. There is also one of the goofiest scenes I've seen in quite some time, where Finn leaves his job in Detroit to go on this cross-country quest, literally stripping naked and walking through the whole office to the waiting truck outside. It's almost mind-boggling that such a needless scene eats up a good five minutes of an already-lengthy film. However, with that being said, the Gatins' truly shine at continually raising the stakes and the tension in this race against time across the entire country, although it seems there are way too many pit stops, as it were, to either lighten the mood or show of something really cool, some of which weren't necessary at all.

Going in, the one thing I was not worried about was the action and the chase scenes, because director Scott Waugh more than proved his worth with his unique style in 2012's Act of Valor. He doesn't disappoint on this front, with a number of thrilling and innovative sequences such as "the grasshopper," where Tobey speeds up the grass embankment of a highway off-ramp and flies over numerous lanes of traffic below. That scene alone is damn near worth the price of admission, as is a fantastic sequence where Tobey puts his impressive skills to the test on the streets of downtown Detroit. On top of all that, we see some of the most truly gorgeous super-cars ever built, such as the Koenigsegg Agera to the Lamborghini Sesta Elemento to the souped-up Shelby Mustang, all of which are multi-million dollar cars that are truly put to the test in amazing ways, with inventive camera work to capture it all.

Aaron Paul does a fine job as Tobey, after his amazing five-season run as Jesse Pinkman on Breaking Bad. Tobey and Jesse could not be more different characters, and, no, he doesn't say "bitch" in the film. This is his first major starring role after the show, and he certainly has the charisma and charm to carry a big-budget movie like this. While each of his supporting cast members has at least one weird/awkward moment, I didn't have any major problems with Scott Mescudi, Rami Malek, Ramon Rodriguez or Dominic Cooper. However, the cast does seem a bit overpopulated, with Dakota Johnson in a glorified cameo as Dino's new flame/Tobey's old flame, Imogen Poots' Julia Maddon and Michael Douglas as Monarch, an Internet racing enthusiast, whose presence reminded me a lot of Cleavon Little's Super Soul in Vanishing Point.

I've seen all too many 90-minute comedies that feature the weirdest, most unnecessary gags that seem to be in place just to hit a run time. Oddly enough, I got that same sort of vibe from Need for Speed, with plenty of clunky dialogue and plot points that could easily be discarded. Still, for what we have here, Need for Speed is not bad at all, providing ample amounts of high-octane thrills that any motorhead or thrill-seeker will enjoy, although I would have enjoyed it a lot more if about a half hour was shaved off.