Fast Girl DVD Review

Alexis “Alex” Johnstone (Mircea Monroe, Drive, House of Dead 2) is a small town girl with dreams of becoming a racecar driver. Racing is in her blood. Her father was a racecar driver and her uncle runs the local racetrack, which is the very track where her father died in a race on the eighth turn.

Alexis is bound and determined to become a professional driver. She “borrows” sports cars from the valet at a local restaurant, but no matter how hard she tries to overcome her demons, she cannot beat turn eight.

When she’s not on the track, Alex works as a waitress at the local diner with her closest friend and boss, Maddie (Caroline Rhea, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, The Caroline Rhea Show).

Things look up for Alex when a race team, team Flying Lizard, rolls into town to practice and she catches the eye of one of the drivers, Daryl K. Sands (Justin Guarini, American Idol, From Justin to Kelly). Daryl begins to teach Alex how to drive like a true racecar driver and he remains patient when she drives his Porsche into the berm. He also helps her to figure out what is wrong with her car.

Despite their budding relationship, Alex begins to blow off Daryl to further pursue racing. She finally finishes the racecar she has been building and begins to take driving lessons from Uncle Bill in anticipation of a major racecar tryout.

Under Bill’s tutelage Alex learns how to drive properly through skill rather than simply guts and anger. These lessons help Alex to earn her race license and enable her to try out for the crème de la crème of racing positions.

Despite the obvious low budget of the film, as well as a preconceived notion regarding Justin Guarini as an actor, Fast Girl was an entertaining surprise. The film is not outstanding by any means and the plot is as predictable as possible, but there is still an engaging aspect of the film that pulls the viewer in. On a similar note, Justin Guarini did a decent job as Daryl K. Sands, and his on screen chemistry with Mircea was believable. Fast Girl was surprisingly better than expected but still not revolutionary.

The most impressive aspect of Fast Girl is the movie’s excellent use of their budget. The film is about racing, and as a result would never be believable if it did not have decent vehicles. The film includes a pair of Porsche 959 racecars, another Porsche 911 that Daryl uses as his daily driver, and a handful of Formula-1 cars whose sticker prices range in the multi-million dollar range.

The filmmakers did make a few seemingly fatal mistakes. The most glaring is the title of the film, Fast Girl, which sounds less like a family oriented movie about a racecar driving girl and more like an R rated or NC-17 film about a wanton trollop.

Fast Girl is presented in Widescreen format and can be viewed in 5.1surround-sound. The special features menu option includes a Fast Girl Making of Featurette and the film’s trailer. Fast Girl can also be viewed with optional Spanish subtitles.