Fourth installment of the saga, Fast and Furious speeds onto the big screen
Posted by The Skyliner on April 8th, 2009
James Turner
Staff Writer
Imagine a vast, flourishing community that stretches out as far as the eye can see. Imagine every high-reaching skyscraper in downtown is built not of bricks or cement but of deep thoughts. Every park is a stroll through boundless imagination. Every resident is not a person but a brilliant idea. Now imagine an enormous hurricane barreling through this affluent community throwing its residents’ lives into chaos and leaving nothing behind but desolation and anarchy where a society of dreams once stood.
That is precisely what happened when Universal Pictures released Fast and Furious, the fourth installment of the racing pandemonium saga. The film features the cast of the original Fast and the Furious, which was released in 2001: Vin Diesel, the talented street racer named Dominic Toretto who is wanted for highway robbery, Paul Walker as Brian O’Conner—former cop and current FBI agent with something to prove, Jordana Brewster as Dominic’s beautiful sister Mia Toretto who brings “Dom” and O’Conner back together and even Michelle Rodriguez as Leticia “Letty” Ortiz—Dominic’s lover. The film has grossed over $30 million in its first few days in the theaters. Viewers and critics alike rave about the surging excitement, the adrenaline pumping action and the cars they never knew could fly, but a broader scope and a look at the big picture tells the real story.
Fast and Furious was a movie about fast cars that explode when they crash. It was thinly veiled with a formulaic “storyline” common to a cosmic host of other action movies: Criminal A falls in love with Babe B; Babe B is killed by Villain C; Criminal A defeats Villain C. Tiresome, really. But when that thin veil was lifted, a stereotypical action movie was kissed by a shoddy script, and Director Justin Lin pronounced them husband and wife. Thankfully the producers provided periodic relief from the 25 cent storyline since it only seemed to show up between the many identical looking races and chases and the start of a random sex scene between Mia Toretto and Brian O’Conner. Surely reality sat in his favorite recliner watching the movie, and screamed “No! That would never happen!”
One possible redeeming grace for Fast and Furious was its photography. Fast and intense chase scenes and car races are not easy to shoot. In most of these sequences—and there were a lot of them—the camera work was at least decent, and sometimes surprisingly good. Especially the car chases in the mountain tunnels which were beautifully captured from the high impact explosions to the briefest close up of Vin Diesel’s severity.
For the speed-craving, intensity-driven action movie fan hyped up on energy drinks, what else is necessary? Muscle cars, gorgeous women, loud explosions . . . what’s not to like, right? The pedal was certainly to the metal. But an audience looking to Fast and Furious for a compelling story with a twist, gripping characters or, dare I say, quality, will find the movie running on fumes all the way from the starting line.