Need For Speed’s petrol-head protagonist Tobey Marshall (Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul) is a hero in the Tom Cruise mould: he’s a race car driver. He’s a pretty good race driver, too. But then he has a crisis of confidence… Stuntman and director Scott Waugh (Act Of Valor) executes his driving scenes extremely well, eschewing the obvious CG and pounding music of the Fast & Furious franchise for an approach that’s a bit closer to car movies of the 60s, 70s and 80s (Bullitt even appears on a drive-in movie screen near the start). This doesn’t mean that Need For Speed doesn’t stretch the boundaries of physical possibility, however; although the tanks, planes and gigantic explosions of the more recent Fast entries are absent, there are still moments where cars fly over colossal ramps and then land without giving the occupants so much as a neck twinge. In terms of drama, Need For Speed is on rougher terrain. Aaron Paul has just the right screen persona to play a stir-crazy driving enthusiast – charismatic, edgy, sardonic – but the script gives him surprisingly few lines of memorable dialogue. This is something of a mistake, given that he was at his best as the garrulous, expressive Jessie in Breaking Bad. Here, he’s the “strong silent type”, as one character puts him – in other words, a wild-eyed cipher with little to say. Dominic Cooper is similarly two-dimensional as his mortal enemy, Dino – though that’s partly because he’s only in a handful of scenes. Then there’s Michael Keaton, who’s extraordinarily weird as the enigmatic Monarch, who organises underground races via a laptop and rambles things into his webcam like, “Wake up and smell the $2m Lambo in your pocket”, and “Maybe the tart was right!” Zany characters like Keaton, in front of his computer with his shooting glasses on, and other colourful comic-relief sidekick types, like Scott Mescudi, who flies everywhere in stolen helicopters, sit oddly with the moments of high drama, lurching car collisions and somewhat cringe-making scenes of solemnity. It takes a skilled writer to move a story between moments of light and shade, and Need For Speed doesn’t always manage it; instead, it feels like a script that was once high on pure soap operatics that’s had certain scenes rewritten to provide a moment or two of levity. Need For Speed isn’t in the same league as the classic car racing movies it references, but as pure, high-octane entertainment, it just about provides the crashes and thrills you’d expect. Need For Speed is out in UK cinemas on the 12th March. Follow our Twitter feed for faster news and bad jokes right here. And be our Facebook chum here.