At first glance, Scott Waugh‘s (Act of Valor) Need For Speed might look like a terrible carbon copy of one of the installments of the Fast and Furious franchise. But upon closer look, that may not be the case.

Aaron Paul plays Tobey Marshall, a mechanic who participates in an underground racing event that results in one of his closest friends getting killed. After being released from his jail sentence, he rallies his old crew to get revenge on Dino (Dominic Cooper), the person who put him in jail and killed his best friend. But the only way to do that is by getting back behind the wheel of a souped up car and participating in a race that stretches across multiple state lines.

A new trailer for the movie has been released, and you can see it below.

Aaron Paul‘s time as Jesse Pinkman comes to a dramatic conclusion when Breaking Bad airs its series finale this Sunday. While there is very little chance of seeing the same character on the Breaking Bad Saul Goodman spinoff, we’ll still get to see more of Paul as the actor is making the jump from the small screen to the big screen. The actor will star in next year’s big screen adaptation of Need For Speed, based on the popular video game of the same name.

Check out the first trailer after the jump.

Battle: Los Angeles
Directed by Jonathan Liebesman
Staring Aaron Eckhart, Michelle Rodriguez, Ne-Yo, Ramon Rodriguez
Rated PG-13
Release date: March 11, 2011

As Battle: Los Angeles begins, we meet Staff Sergeant Michael Nantz (Aaron Eckhart). He is an older soldier, and at the start of the movie, decides that his best years are behind him, and chooses to retire. As fate would have it, he has one last mission, and he is assigned to a group of Marines led by a young Lieutenant (Ramon Rodriguez). Unfortunately, that last mission involves aliens invading and the possible end of mankind. The rest of the movie deals with the Marines trying to rescue some civilians while fighting the alien menace.

Battle: Los Angeles tries to be a combination of Black Hawk Down and District 9, but unfortunately, it never reaches the levels of either. To be fair, I don’t think it was the creator’s goal to make as deep a movie as those two are. It seems like they just wanted to make a cool alien invasion movie, and in that they succeeded. The movie has a pretty fast pace, and never slows down for too long, meaning that I didn’t ever lose interest in what was going on. The CGI is decent enough; director Jonathan Liebesman and his team chose to use a lot of smoke to obscure the effects a little. You very rarely get a good look at the aliens, and they’re never really established as a threat, other than having superior firepower, but even then, the aliens can be taken down with modern human weaponry.