Aaron Paul (best known as Jessie on the recently concluded Breaking Bad) has piercing
blue eyes, a wide forehead topped with a shock of slick brown hair, and a gruff
monotone. He looks like he could be the
son James Caan didn’t know he had (notwithstanding Buddy the Elf), which makes
him as fit as any young stud to play a troubled car mechanic-turned-federal
fugitive in NEED FOR SPEED.
Toby Marshall (Paul) is a
reputable small-town grease monkey running his recently-deceased father’s chop
shop. He and his crew are good under the
hood, but even better at performing customized car upgrades and racing rivals
on weekends. One such contest is
prefaced by a nighttime rendezvous outside a drive-in theater, where naturally
everyone’s watching the extended—and iconic—car chase from the 1968 Steve
McQueen thriller, BULLITT. The ’50s-ish sequence
smacks of GREASE and THE OUTSIDERS; you expect Fonzie to pull up on his
motorcycle. Screenwriter George Gatins
casts Toby’s close-knit group as a bunch of likeable, down-home, jeans and
T-shirt wearing red-blooded American boys with a love for fast women and even
faster automobiles.
