Review: Fast & Furious

1 ½ *

Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Jordana Brewster, Michelle Rodriguez. Written by Chris Morgan and Gary Scott Thompson. Directed by Justin Lin. Rated PG-13 (intense sequences of violence and action, some sexual content, language & drug references). 99 minutes. Universal Pictures.

Round four of the Fast & Furious franchise brings back the original cast back for a loud and empty attitude show dressed up as a movie. 2004’s unexpected hit featured fast cars and hot girls, and helped launch the careers of Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Michelle Rodriguez and Jordana Brewster—each of whom returns this time for obvious career reasons.

Opening in the Dominican Republic, director Justin Lin (Better Luck Tomorrow, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift) mounts an exciting sequence involving the botched heist of a fuel tanker on a serpentine mountain highway.

Career criminal Dom (Diesel) and babe Letty (Rodriguez), partners in love and crime, survive the cataclysmic crash and explosion in the logic-defying sequence, the only real thrill in a movie that goes off the cliff right then, and never recovers.

Back in L.A. and worried that the cops trailing him will endanger his girl, Dom splits town but soon returns to avenge a shady death by reluctantly teaming up with former enemy and FBI mole Brian O’Connor (Walker) to take down a mysterious Mexican drug kingpin. In a laughable romantic subplot, Dom’s sister Mia (Brewster) still pines for O’Connor, the undercover agent who ditched her in the first film.

“What if you’re not a good guy pretending to be a bad guy? What if you’re a bad guy pretending to be a good guy?” Unintentionally funny dialogue peppers the film, hampered by the solemnity of the cast, who lament lost loves in uncomfortable close-ups between the action scenes.

But is it exciting? Not really. The film fails to mount any solid chase sequences, including an urban race featuring a cameo by Brandon T. Jackson featuring a gimmicky reliance on GPS. And a climactic chase tunneling through rock formations is murky, incoherent and implausible.

It’s hard to believe that Diesel, glowering here with a self-conscious cadence and posture, was only recently the Next Big Thing. The actor, after shunning prior sequels to do said bigger things, has proven he can be real (Saving Private Ryan, Boiler Room), funny (The Pacifier) and sometimes magnetic (Pitch Black). But in nonsense like Fast & Furious and XXX, his tough-guy attitude now seems little more than retro caricature, and his brawn is still his calling card.

Walker, of the model’s physique and expressionless vacancy, is the most pallid of American actors. Only Brewster, in a role thinner than her alarming physique, attempts (and fails) to bring substance to what can charitably be called an underwritten fling. Hellcat Rodriguez, in a payday cameo, looks great and says nothing, like the film.

None of this matters, because Fast & Furious is the kind of puerile “audience” picture commonly referred to as critic-proof, never meant to satisfy an iota of aesthetic or thematic criteria yet certain to be embraced by its undiscerning target audience.

So then what does matter here? Muscles? Muscle cars? Chicks making out? Explosions? Revenge? That about covers it.

- Lee Shoquist