I love a bad movie. Well, not a bad movie, but a bad movie. The kind of movie that makes you question how it got a green light, and how it was able to proceed at any step of the process. Movies that make you wonder if anyone, or everyone, involved knew how bad it was going to be. They must have known, right?
“Superfast!” is one of those movies. It is from the writer-director duo Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer who made “Spy Hard” and “Scary Movie”, and then several other movies of decreasing quality. The latest, and probably worst, is “Superfast!”
The movie is a spoof of “The Fast and the Furious” films. The plot is mostly pulled from the first film in the F&F franchise: An undercover cop joins a gang of street racers to try and take down a criminal kingpin in Los Angeles. Later in the film we get a Dwayne Johnson-esque character and a chase scene with a safe being dragged down the street behind cars, so it really covers the whole franchise. In the typical style of Friedberg and Seltzer’s spoofs, it takes scenes from its target movies, adds absurdity and fart noises, and strings them together in what could charitably be described as a story.
There were a few laughs if you’re not thinking too hard and, like me, you have a fondness for comically oversized Mexican food. There are many more cheap jokes and tired stereotypes, and much of it is just so slow, dragging out bad jokes about obliviousness and baby oil. I want to think it would be better if you, how do you kids say, smoke the reefer? But honestly, you’d probably just fall asleep.
This is a really bad movie. The writing is lazy, the acting is rough, even the B-roll footage of Los Angeles looks cheap. But can you really complain? On the one hand, it is basically the same movie that these two have been making for the last two decades. Everyone laughed at “Scary Movie”, in the same way that everyone laughs when a four-year-old says “fart.”
Then they made eight more similar movies, in the same way that a four-year-old continues to say “fart” long after it isn’t funny anymore. On the other hand, you know what you’re getting; it’s a piss-take on a franchise that is more than a little ridiculous. Nobody’s promising a Best Picture and nobody is expecting anything more than bad jokes and cultural references.
“Superfast!” only managed to pull in $US2 ($3) million box office on a $US20 ($29) million dollar budget. After making movies pretty consistently since 2006, the duo has been absent since the release of this movie in 2015. Given the low box office numbers of their last few films, this could be their swan song. A bit of a bummer since I was looking forward to their previously announced “Taken” spoof: “Who the Fuck Took My Daughter?”
In any case, if you like bad movies, or you have absolutely nothing better to do with your weekend, renting this is a solid way to waste $5 and 99 minutes of your life.