Aaron Paul was highly memorable on Breaking Bad, and is generally a really nice guy. Which is probably why he’s involved with video game adaptation Need For Speed in the first place; they kept bugging him until he said yes. Either that or he got a very large check.
See how long you can sit through this trailer before you start wondering how big of a check they offered Paul. Myself, I got as far as the “yo mama” joke:
Wait, Michael Keaton is in this too? When did that happen? Was he just on set to visit somebody and felt bad about swiping a sandwich from craft services?
Being, as I am, an enormous car movie nerd, I also can’t help but notice this actually seems to be pretty much everything vaguely related to movies about cars tossed in a blender. Michael Keaton appears to be playing the whitebread version of Super Soul from Vanishing Point. The cinematography is pretty heavily “inspired” by Drive in a lot of places. They even crib a shot from Thelma and Louise in the trailer.
On the other hand, they also destroy several million dollars’ worth of cars in less than two minutes, and that’s really the only reason anyone goes to see a movie like this. So it at least knows why we’d be showing up to a movie called Need For Speed.
I’m kind of hoping that all of this is an elaborate gag and it turns out to be a spoof of ridiculous car movies. Either that or it turns out to be a masterpiece of cheese like the sublimely awful Torque. We can only hope.