Fast and Furious

Title: Fast and Furious (aka ‘The Fast and the Furious: IV)
Rating: 2.5/5
Genre: Action
Starring: Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Jordana Brewster
Director: Justin Lin

If one were to peruse my ever-growing DVD collection pinned by bookcase to my wall there would probably be little to surprise you. Plenty of classics, drama (and an entire shelf devoted to stuff from Japan), but slapped between “Fargo” and “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” comfortably sits this anomoly. Yes, I have a soft spot for these films in the same manner people have a soft spot for Top Gear; it has no real pretense of pretending to be more than it really is, and as a result are able to market towards what I want from an action film. Yes, the plot is ridiculous and the acting atrocious, but it has silly stunts performed by plenty of cute women and even hotter cars. Who could say no?

Welcoming the return of both Vin Diesel and Paul Walker for the first time since the first in the series made an impression, it is old man Toretto (Diesel) that’s brought out of hiding when his girlfriend Letty (Rodriguez) was killed by a rival drug smuggler working for the Koreans in ‘Korea-Town’ (no seriously). Or was that Mexicans? I don’t think it was really addressed. Either way, it also happens that it is this same drug smuggler that O’Connor has been tracking for the past couple of years, and they’ve just got a break, provided he can can infiltrate and win over the trust of the gang. By racing. Naturally. On goes the plot filled with uninspired dialogue and plot twists so obvious you thought you were meant to know them from the beginning, all designed to get them both either back in a car at high speed against oncoming traffic or something else equally dangerous, and if they cant figure out how to do that then they’ll throw in an explosion. I mean, why not?

Lets say theres more than a few issues I had with all this. Killing off the hottest cast member within ten minutes: bad move – and no Vin, you didn’t hide the fact you didn’t know how to demonstrate your sorrow by getting angry and thumping everything in sight – but then to ‘replace’ her with an annoying, tight-lipped, dark haired skinny girl with about as much attitude about her as a plank of wood with a smilie face drawn on it is simply unforgivable (though she can be very attractive, no doubt why she got the job, but this film never manages to show that side of her). The fact of the matter is, the only real prominent ‘hottie’ (excluding Jordana Brewster, playing Toretto’s sister in poorly lit areas for 10 minutes) left was the new bottom rung agent ‘Sophie Trinh’ (Liza Lapira). Seeing as the plot was nonsensical, and theres already the ‘coincidence’ of the two leads ending up working together anyway, couldn’t they find some clever way to get her in a bikini?

Then theres the action itself. Let’s take the opening sequence as by describing it I’ll be giving away none of the story. Firstly, we follow the gang with a few new members on board to steal petrol; yes, prices have gotten so high that they can apparently no longer afford to race and have to resort to stealing it. But that’s not all, it’s the manner they do it; the truck hauling four tanks (I’ve never seen as many as two) along a cliff edge – clearly the safest place to carry out a heist at high speed – and how to steal it? Well simply chucking the driver out would be too difficult, so lets drive in reverse in big trucks, and attach ourselves to the other end whilst our team mate freezes the connector with a handy spray can of liquid nitrogen so that the links can be smashed. Simple.

And y’know what? It works. Yes, its stupid and idiotic, the action is done to look good and the plot has more holes in it than a good block of swiss cheese, but it never really bothers to slow down to try and explain any of this nonsensical story. In fact if anything they spend too long devoted to threading the plot together and sticking in brief bits of dialogue along the lines of ‘hey, remember when we did that in the first film? That was great.’ By all rights I should be continuing to slam this film for making a special ed. class look like einstein, but there is a sort of talent here; they know what a male audience wants from an action film, and so long as theres still cute women driving fast cars in an ‘explosive’ style, I shall happily continue to be mindlessly entertained.