Fast cars, slow script

Fast and Furious
Review by Nathan Weinbender

I love a great car chase, but the “Fast and the Furious” movies have never been about the chases; they are about the crashes. Once you’ve seen one car crash, though, you’ve seen them all, and if your idea of a good night out is watching car after impeccable, expensive car crumpled up like a used cocktail napkin, then this is the movie for you.

Here we have the fourth film in the “Fast and the Furious” franchise, and the first sequel to feature the complete cast of the original entry in the series, which was released in 2001. It is simply called “Fast and Furious,” either because the producers thought “4 Fast 4 Furious” wasn’t a marketable title or because this movie just doesn’t have time for the’s.

No matter. The movie plays like a calendar of souped-up cars driven by beautiful people—if the cast looked like Abercrombie and Fitch models eight years ago, now they look like Calvin Klein models—which is all you should be expecting. But for a film that purports to be fast and furious, this is a curiously dismal affair, missing any real sense of fun, danger or unpredictability.

The picture opens well, with speed racer extraordinaire Dom (Vin Diesel), who ran off to Mexico after the first “F&F,” and his girlfriend Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) hijacking an oil tanker truck in the Dominican Republic. Dom learns that the feds are planning to crack down on him, so he abandons Letty, who is mysteriously murdered before the end of the first reel.

Enter Brian O’Connor (Paul Walker), the undercover police officer who befriended Dom in the first film. He discovers that Letty was involved with a notorious drug runner whose mules are car racers, and he again infiltrates the world of illegal street racing. Dom shows up, too, because he wants revenge on Letty’s killer, but he’s still sore at Brian for not revealing he was a cop back in the first movie.

Before long, Dom and Brian are opponents engaged in full-on, pedal-to-the-medal street racing. They zigzag through downtown L.A., which is clogged with traffic, with hardly a scratch—although their challengers and the other drivers on the road aren’t so lucky.

Let me get this straight: O’Connor is going undercover as a drag racer, so the FBI supplies him with three flawless speed demons. Okay, I can buy that. But would they really allow him to take part in a race that is not only illegal but will inflict untold damage upon the city and put hundreds of lives at stake? I’ve heard of dedication to one’s craft, but that’s pushing it.

The movie continues, but the script does not. There is a lot more auto racing (most of which is clearly computer-generated), some sexual tension between O’Connor and Dom’s sister Mia (Jordana Brewster), a big reveal involving the villain (which I thought was obvious from the get-go), a burgeoning camaraderie between Dom and Brian, and a soundtrack that is aggressively, annoyingly loud.

Watching “Fast and Furious” is like driving an old, rundown clunker: It stops and starts a lot, it’s made entirely of spare parts and it runs out of gas before it reaches its destination.

Directed by Justin Lin. Written by Chris Morgan. Starring Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Jordana Brewster, Michelle Rodriguez and John Ortiz. PG-13; 107m.