Faster (2010)

Faster arrives with the grim efficiency of a man who has already decided what he is going to do and sees no reason to discuss it. Dwayne Johnson, playing a character credited only as Driver, leaves prison and works through a list of names, and the film treats the whole business as an administrative matter. There is no montage of moral hesitation. No scene in which a wise friend explains that vengeance is corrosive. Roger Ebert observed that with a period change and sharper dialogue this could have passed for 1940s noir. He was right, and he meant it as the faintest possible compliment.

The cast is diverse in a way that nobody on screen feels compelled to mention. A Black director, a Samoan-American star, and supporting turns from Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Mike Epps, and Moon Bloodgood form a genuinely mixed ensemble, and the film simply uses them. Carla Gugino's Detective Cicero is competent, dogged, and entirely uninterested in making a point about her gender. Race never becomes a subject. Money never becomes a subject, though everyone in the story is chasing it. The villains are individuals with names and grievances, not a system, and the screenplay has no ambition to pretend otherwise.

The closest the film comes to a sermon is the evangelist Alexander Jarod, a former criminal who found religion and begs for his life in a church. That scene concerns grace and forgiveness, which are old concerns, not new ones. It plays as histrionic, as several critics noted at the time, but it is not a lecture about society. Left over is a lean, joyless machine of a movie that wants only to move forward. It offers nothing to the cultural moment and asks nothing of it. In 2010 that read as a limitation. Viewed now, it reads as a small mercy.