Full Speed (2016)

The French highway farce released in English as Full Speed concerns a plastic surgeon named Tom, his new high-tech sedan, and the regrettable decision of that sedan's cruise control to seize at 130 kilometres per hour. A grandfather smuggles himself aboard. A stranded young woman is smuggled aboard as well. The car cannot stop, the family cannot exit, and the motorway unspools toward a hundred near-collisions. It is a machine built for slapstick, and it performs that function with the efficiency of a well-tuned engine.

From the standpoint of social consciousness, the film is a curious vacuum. The cast is uniformly white and French, with a painter and a broadcast journalist drifting through the frame in roles that carry no argument. The women, Julia and Melody, spend most of the running time as passengers in a vehicle driven by men, and the screenplay never troubles itself to notice. Race goes unengaged. So does the environment, despite a premise in which consumer technology nearly kills an entire family, a premise a more earnest production might have bent toward a sermon on consumption. This film uses the malfunctioning car as a whoopee cushion instead. The surgeon's vanity purchase is mocked, but gently, and the mockery lands on the man's ego, not on the economic order that produced him.

What remains is a competent, mildly exhausting comedy of escalation, the sort of thing French audiences rewarded with roughly 950,000 admissions and a sixth-place debut. There is no lecture here, no lesson, no moral instruction of any kind. The film wants only to move fast and to let the audience laugh at the motion. On the scale of cultural messaging, it registers as an empty tank. A road movie with the brakes cut and nothing on its mind but the road.