I guess the summer starts in April now. If you like the Fast and Furious franchise, you won’t be disappointed with this iteration. In the internal chronological sequence of these movies this is technically the fourth, with Tokyo Drift being the last. That allows the director, Justin Lin, and writer, Chris Morgan (hilariously spoofed on The Onion for this movie) to reunite co-stars from each of the previous movies, including Han (Sung Kang), who was supposedly killed in Tokyo Drift. It also throws in Dwayne Johnson and a handful of other newbies for fun. The result is exactly as you would expect: bigger, louder, more of everything. But it still sticks to the essence of the franchise: lots and lots of fast driving; supernaturally beautiful women; and the brooding presence of Vin Diesel. And that makes it work, within the confines of the genre. The final chase scene, however implausible, of two cars pulling a giant bank vault around Rio de Janeiro is a tour de force. It is a heist movie, and a buddy movie, and a stunt movie, and a story about family values. What can I say, I’m a sucker for this kind of thing. I’m pretty sure I never took my car out of third the whole drive home, and some of that was on interstate.
Well…. I did enjoy it. I was pretty damn hopeful after the train gag, early on: stealing fast cars from a moving train by–what!?!–plasma-cutting through the side of the train, having a very fast carrier-truck ride parallel to the tracks so that the cars can be yanked off the train ONTO the truck, and then lowered onto the desert floor, while the truck maintains its speed? But…. why? And….what?!? I’m in.
It’s so utterly ridiculous–and I haven’t even mentioned the double-cross or the bridge coming up quickly!–that I was enthralled.
And every time people in this movie shut up and do ridiculous things with cars, I loved it. Every time they talked, or in the case of Paul Walker stared blankly while smiling, or in the case of Vin Diesel minutely turned your eyebrows down to suggest displeasure and/or thinking, or in the case of Dwayne Johnson GOT FUCKING ANGRYFACED, I was less interested. And, alas, there’s a lot of people talking. There’s a thin layer of heist-film details, but so haphazardly and wantonly deployed (let’s sneak a remote-controlled vehicle into the police storage area so we can drive up to it and see the vault door–yup, there’s the door) that I almost got into the film as a hyperbolic parody of these films. But… nah.
Still, the stunts are far from stunted, and I enjoyed the batshit lunacy of these hijinks enough to forgive the overlong passages where we were supposed to care about the camaraderie or the characters or the illusion of a carefully-plotted criminal venture.
the fast and the furious meet ocean’s eleven, minus the wit. but fun enough. the thing i found most interesting about it was that vin diesel is apparently a bigger star than the rock. i wonder what the negotiations were like that allowed diesel to win his fight against the rock.