Braving the Awful – Superfast! (2015)

Juvenile kings.  It’s the scourge of comedy, Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, spoofing The Fast and the Furious, and that’s really all that needs to be said as far as a plot description.  I’m not going to be shy about it, I’m just going to come out and say it: these movies are the laziest kind of filmmaking in existence.  The Cure for Insomnia has more merit than anything made by these two cinematic knuckleheads.  It says a lot when I can subjectively say that this is probably their best film to date… and there’s still nothing worthwhile about it.  You know you’re the scum of cinema when you have reached the peak of your career, and there still isn’t a single good thing to be said about what you’ve made, it is only good when compared to the other films in your unholy library.

Nothing is as bad as Meet the Spartans.

While I did miss The Starving Games and Best Night Ever, I have seen Vampires Suck, Disaster Movie and Meet the Spartans, so I know their ilk.  When you look at Disaster Movie, there is documentation that their plan of attack was to look at the list of movies coming up during the summer so as to stay ahead of the curve, and shoot their stupid low-brow jokes before those films were even released, solely based on the trailers.  They’re not even worthwhile gags, just the character pointing off-screen, saying “look, it’s ___”, cutting to ___, and quickly following it with some sort of nut shot or pratfall.  What makes this movie marginally better than that is that this is kept mostly contained to the Fast and Furious universe, and there are less of the arbitrary references.  That said, they can’t even keep their timeline straight, because believe it or not, this is a direct parody of not of the most recent Fast and Furious movies, but the FIRST film, which makes them 14 years late to the game.  On top of that, they also include a Dwayne Johnson impersonator, when he didn’t even show up until the fifth movie… I don’t know why I even bother, it’s not like any of this matters.

Even Uwe Boll has Rampage, Friedberg and Seltzer have created an entire library that does not deserve to exist.

What’s even more frustrating is the fact that Friedberg and Seltzer don’t pick the worst movies to parody; I love Furious Seven, but if you’ve seen the levels of ridiculous they are reaching, you know that it is absolutely ripe for riffing.  They just don’t take the time to write humor, and their idea of a recurring joke is to have a character that is always eating.  Other than that, it’s filled with moments where you can tell that they can’t think of a way to end a scene, so they just hit a character with something.  To say that there’s no payoff would be putting it lightly, and they don’t have the aptitude to be able to identify when a joke isn’t working, they just leave the camera running and keep milking painful joke after painful joke.

It doesn’t matter that you have somebody who has the Vin Disel look down if you’re not going to write him any jokes.

The question that you must be asking yourself is why I would take the time to watch something that is so obviously dogshit.  Am I just an idiot masochist?  Perhaps, but the real reason I do it, or at least the reason I tell myself I do it, is that once I see something that is truly made for the lowest common denominator, it makes me appreciate other films that much more.  The Man with the Iron Fists 2 looks like a John Woo masterpiece after I watch this.  The Boy Next Door looks like deftly written Shakespeare when compared to this… You catch my drift.

Superfast! 1/2

– Critic for Hire