You know what makes me so mad I could spend years plotting my elaborate, blood-soaked, unstoppable revenge?

Musicals.

I recognize that my two chief complaints about them — a) no one in the history of people has ever broken into an orchestrated song about their problems and feelings, and b) repeatedly stopping cold for four-minute song-and-dance sessions completely destroys a movie's momentum — are irrelevant.

If you're a fan of musicals, I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm just saying if the abstract concept of musicals were personified, I would arm myself until I couldn't move without the assistance of an electric scooter and hunt those criminals down until the world ran out of shotgun shells.

-- Local show times, theaters, trailer.

Every revenge story since the tale of the amoeba that killed the other amoeba's amoebafriend tells me I wouldn't actually enjoy it. That I would, ultimately, find no satisfaction in my brutal and relentless quest. But I think I'd have such a grand old time I'd have to sing about it no matter what modern revenge pieces like Faster have to say.

Ten years ago, Dwayne "the Rock" Johnson was the driver for a bank job. They got away, but were set up by another crew; Johnson was arrested, his brother stabbed to death.

Now Johnson's released from prison. He's out to hunt down his brother's killers one by one. Only three people might be able to stop him: junkie cop Billy Bob Thornton and his unwilling partner Carla Gugino, and Oliver Jackson-Cohen, an impeccable hitman who's never met his match.

Will he meet that match in Johnson? Oh, he just might. Because Johnson — ah, screw it. I don't care how IMDb credits him, I'm still calling him the Rock. And if he doesn't like it, he can...remember there are laws against assault and murder and please don't hurt me, Mr. Rock. I intend it solely as a term of well-earned respect.

Because the Rock has presence. When he walks into a room, he makes everyone else in the room look like a bunch of gnomes, toddlers and Gollums. Director George Tillman Jr. plays that to the hilt, filming the Rock from low angles that suggest he's so huge he shouldn't be walking through doors at all, just bursting through Rock-shaped holes through the walls.

It's a testament to that presence that he can still drum up interest in his character despite doing very little other than striding through doors, shooting people with a revolver the size of a record-holding burrito, and tooling across empty desert roads. Faster is a revenge flick, and in revenge flicks, you learn one thing: shooting the wicked is cool. Wait, you learn two things: the shooting thing, and that no amount of wicked-person-shooting, no matter how cool it may be, will bring back the one you're avenging/fill the void in your soul.

Writers Tony and Joe Gayton do try to mix things up. Jackson-Cohen's hitman is an odd figure, driven not by money but by a pathological compulsion to conquer everything he tries, including yoga. It's an interesting concept that never really lives up to its potential.

Same thing for Faster as a whole. Tillman handles his hard-shootin', hard-drivin' scenes well enough. There's a bit of humor. Thornton wafts some of the decay away from his role as a substance-abusing, ex-wife-having cop who's two weeks from retirement but wants to take care of one last big case even if it means butting heads with his new partner. (In a surprise move, his captain does not yell at him for being a loose cannon.) The plot throws a couple curves, but we're not talking Felix Hernandez-level breaking balls.

Faster is good enough to be entertaining. But despite the potential its creators are flashing for future works, this time, they've just come away with a watchable movie that doesn't stand out from its genre buddies.

Grade: B-