Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
4/18/09
I'm mostly an outsider to
the Fast/Furious franchise that began with, well, 2001's The
Fast and the Furious. I passed on that junky-looking hit (probably
would have gone today, I didn't live five minutes from a theater then like
I do now) but caught the sequels 2 Fast 2 Furious (adequate, if
for no other reason because it includes the line “This is some serious
Dukes of Hazzard shit!”) and Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift
(inadequate, if for no other reason because of the relentlessly clunky
way star Lucas Black pronounced the word “gaijin”) at the Drive-In, mostly
because I'd go to see just about anything there. Now, at last, I
paid good money without the benefit of starlight and hamburgers to catch
a new installment, and just in time: with a bigger scale, better
story and more swagger than the previous chapters, Fast & Furious
is good old-fashioned junky fun.
Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel,
star of FF1 who cameoed in FF3) and his girlfriend Letty
(Michelle Rodriguez, from FF1) are living high as gas truck thieves
in the Dominican Republic, but the heat is closing in and he feels the
need to go it alone. Letty heads for the US, while right-hand Han
(Sung Kang, from FF3) heads back to Tokyo. Meanwhile, in Los
Angeles Brian O'Conner (Paul Walker, from FFs 1 & 2) has been
reinstated by the FBI and is pursuing the drug ring of the mysterious Arturo
Braga. When Letty is murdered, both men have good reason to investigate
and the trail leads to Braga's henchman Campos (John Ortiz), who recruits
the fastest street racers to smuggle drugs across the US/Mexican border.
Both Brian and Dominic win spots on his crew, reopening old wounds both
between them and Dom's sister Mia (Jordana Brewster, from FF1).
From there, it's all fast cars and vengeance: I wouldn't wanna be
the sadistic thug who killed Dominic Toretto's girl!
Fast & Furious
shares with its' predecessors a tendency to approach Steven Cannell material
like it was Shakespeare. During some of the slower expositional scenes
I had fun trying to see if I could guess the next line of dialog (Mia:
“Let this go. Before it's too late.” Brian: “It's already
too late”; Brian: “This is where my jurisdiction ends.”
Dominic: “And mine begins.”). The street racing sequences are
filled with bizarre poseurs surrounded by beautiful women they must be
paying by the hour. But because the plot has both logic and momentum
and the action sequences are first-rate, the cast's goofy intensity emerges
as a virtue.
And the action really does
rock. The opening assault on a tanker by Dominic's team is electric,
as are a pair of high-speed races through a network of mine tunnels under
the border. The climax is a wonderfully choreographed ballet of mayhem
where skill and luck combine to reward the virtuous and punish the guilty.
Director Justin Lin has far more luck than in his previous go-round on
the third installment, perhaps because this time he doesn't have the burden
of trying to sell us the automotive equivalent of the Electric Boogaloo.
As I mentioned, the cast
is guilty of going after their rote dialog with far more conviction than
it probably deserves. But they clearly relish returning to these
roles, and it's a crying shame we don't get to see more of Rodriguez, who's
come to chew bubblegum and race cars and is all out of bubblegum.
Diesel has searched in vain since Pitch Black for a vehicle worthy
of his seemingly bottomless reserve of tough-guy cool, and F&F comes
as close as any, in part because of his nice hot/cold chemistry with Walker.
Both here and in the 2nd movie, I don't know about Brian O'Conner, tormented
crimefighter, but I love the way Walker comes to life the moment anyone
suggests breaking the law or driving really fast. He does a really
effective job of suggesting that Brian's job with the FBI crushes his soul
just as much as the work of any cubicle jockey. It's a shame Brewster
almost never gets to join the fun: an amazing amount of work clearly
went into assuring that her blouses show off virtually perfect cleavage,
but almost none seems to have been devoted to giving her something to do.
Of course, this is the kind of movie where the female characters are on
hand mostly to assure us that no matter how hard they ogle those cars,
the heroes really do like girls too.
There are some great villains
in the guest cast, with Ortiz delivering a delightfully squirly henchmen
and Laz Alonso lives large as a truly demented thug. I really liked
the liaise-fair style Jack Conley brings to the role of Brian's FBI boss,
and Shea Whigham is fun as his odious office rival. And I have to
say that Chris Morgan's script, for all its' shaggy dog clunkiness, pulls
a nice surprise out of its' hat near the end that I didn't see coming.
Fast & Furious
is the kind of movie that sits firmly on one side of the eternal cinematic
struggle between art and commerce. It's goofy and ungainly, but delivers
all the fast cars and thrills you could hope for. And I'd imagine
it'll really rock for people who're actually fans of the franchise. |
