Dorkgasm Gonzo Is God

    When Justin Lin picked up the Fast & Furious franchise a few years back, I was hopeful.  The series is mindlessly dumb, no doubt about that, but what could a smart and savvy director do with it?  It was somewhat disappointing that he cast the very white Lucas Black in a movie about street racers in Tokyo, but Tokyo Drift was a smarter film than its predecessors were.  The latest installment, simply titled Fast & Furious, gains only a few more IQ points, but they’re enough to make a noticeable improvement.

    See, no one involved with this franchise has ever pretended that it was high drama or even low art.  Rob Cohen even admitted to stealing the plot from Point Break on the first film in order to showcase a cool concept he had read about. The films in this series have always stood on their own, with audiences flocking to see Vin Diesel play a bad ass who drives fast cars and hangs out with fast women.  The second film faltered because it tried too hard to be a bad CSI: Miami episode, and the third regained some of the glory of the first because it went after a new concept in drifting.  Justin Lin found another new concept for this film, not in the modded cars, but in the characters.  This time, the feature is a revenge plot.

Click image to visit the site
Image copyright Universal Pictures


    The boys and girls in this film are still the vacant stereotypes we know from before, but in playing with revenge and redemption themes, Lin makes us actually give a crap about what happens to them.  When a drug lord kills someone close to the now-infamous Dominic Toretto (Diesel), the fugitive comes home to Los Angeles.  Brian O’Connor (Paul Walker) is now an FBI agent, and so is working the case from the other side of the legal line.  Inevitably, the two must team up and put aside their differences to bring down the bad guy, and this of course involves lots of fast driving. 

    The cars in the film are a mix of rice burners and traditional muscle cars, and the emphasis is placed on the driver instead of the technology.  That’s about where the gearhead-speak ends with this film, and the effect is to make it more universally accessible to viewers.  It’s the lesson that H.B. Halicki taught filmmakers back in the 70s:  Make your chase scenes fun to watch, and the rest of the “car stuff” will come together.  Of course, it helps that the characters are also fun to watch, even if they don’t always make much sense.



    Beyond the main cast, everyone in the cast is a cardboard cutout.  From the sleazy drug lord to the angry FBI captain, personalities all seem to have been manufactured via the cookie cutter method.  The main cast fairs only slightly better, with Dom coming out on top as the least predicable of them all.  This suits Vin Diesel just fine, and I personally enjoyed not being sure who Dom would kill and who he would just beat up.  His sister (again played by Jordana Brewster), is a bit more shallow this go-around, consenting to an out-of-nowhere quickie on the kitchen counter after she realizes that the two men in her life are going toe to toe with an army of killers.  Brian O’Conner keeps trying to be a good cop, even though every fan knows he sucks at it.  I complain only because it has taken three movies for him to realize that he always ends up on the side of the law-breakers, not the law. 

    Overall, Fast & Furious has a kind of dumb plot, but its fun as hell.  Justin Lin embraces the fact that he’s making a popcorn movie, and takes us on a ride worth the price of admission.  Vin Diesel knows how to lay the big, mean badass very well, and if it was good enough when  Eastwood and McQueen did it for our folks, it’s good enough for me now.  More so than its predecessors, this is a movie meant to be seen on the big-screen.  In an age where Hollywood is turning more and more to gimmicks like 3-D, it really is refreshing to see something that grabs your attention and holds it with the kind of movie magic classics like Two-Lane Blacktop, Bullet, and Vanishing Point were made from.  

Final Verdict (out of 5):