It’s particularly true that you can lean on a tired plotline when you’re appealing to gearhead culture; you certainly won’t find any Oscars on the mantel for The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, but for all its silliness, it’s endlessly entertaining. Unfortunately, it’s that unavoidable comparison to the Fast & Furious series where NFS starts to look like the freshman effort that it is. Apart from Michael Keaton, who plays an eccentric millionaire operating an illegal street race, the only recognizable star from the film is Paul himself, and he hasn’t yet shaken his image as Breaking Bad’s rage-prone loser Jesse Pinkman. (Somehow I kept expecting him to slink off somewhere and smoke meth.) No doubt there are A-listers who have built an entire career playing more or less the same character — Bruce Willis, to name but one example — but Aaron Paul is a long way from Bruce Willis,.

A surprisingly low-explosion affair

Still, for what it tries to be, a movie like NFS can be saved by the action alone. You might think that a film filled to the brim with exotic cars and testosterone would beget an endless string of massive explosions, but NFS is a surprisingly low-explosion affair. Apart from a fiery Koenigsegg Agera flipping spectacularly off of a bridge, most of the action is limited to driving and the occasional crash. That may be due in part to the movie’s budget, roughly a third of last year’s Fast & Furious 6. Impressively, NFS involves essentially zero CGI and the actors did many of their own stunts. Aaron Paul took a crash course in stunt driving, and Scott Mescudi — better known by his stage name, Kid Cudi — actually learned to fly for the role, which involves spending most of the film piloting an aircraft or helicopter of some sort.

But that DIY attitude of the film’s production comes out in places; I couldn’t shake the feeling that the adrenaline-packed action sequences could’ve been considerably more intense. Even a high-speed cliffside chase felt strangely brief and low-stakes. If this had been a Fast & Furious movie, the sequence would’ve been three times longer, more people would’ve died, and something — something — would’ve exploded. A cargo plane, a battleship, a speedboat, I don’t care. Something!

NFS has turned out to be an odd pairing of a big-budget video game franchise to its mid-budget film adaptation, a dangerous equation that comes off feeling like an actual video game cutscene: lifeless, ill-conceived filler that gamers just want to skip through to get to the good parts.