Fast & Furious (2009) Review

 

 Fast & Furious (2009)

What goes up must come down. Of course, defining the comedown in the Fast and Furious franchise is a matter of debate. The film series hit its financial low with the previous film, Tokyo Drift, since audiences apparently wouldn’t bother with a Fast film that didn’t feature either Paul Walker or Vin Diesel in the lead role. This didn’t matter on the creative front though; series newcomers Justin Lin (director) and Chris Morgan (writer) were brought in to conceive an in-name-only Fast movie that was originally slated to go direct to video and in the process they created the best one up to that point. Likely sensing a great opportunity for rejuvenation, the producers kept Lin and Morgan for the next chapter and reunited the stars of the original movie that started it all. The decisions worked out on their end, as the starkly titled Fast & Furious brought the series back into the pop culture forefront. The film itself is another matter, however, as it settles into a dour tone that saps the life and excitement out of the whole endeavor in a bid for integrity.

Things start out fine enough. The opening heist on a gas tanker announces that we’re in back familiar territory with old friends Dom, Letty, and…Han?! That’s right, the best character from the Tokyo diversion is alive and well, and his short appearance positions this film as a prequel. Anyway, the thrilling heist goes awry but Dom and Letty make it out alive after dodging the horrifying sight of bad special effects. Our reconnection with these two is short-lived as they go their separate ways and Dom learns some time later that she was murdered in connection with drug lord Arturo Braga. Dom’s search for her killer reunites him with Brian O’Connor, who has (inexplicably) joined the FBI and is also on Braga’s trail, so the two join forces in revenge for their slain friend.

The death of a character who barely clocked more than half an hour of screen time across two films doesn’t register as strongly as it does for Dom, but it’s a satisfying enough setup for him to cross paths again with Brian. Each of them also gets their own reintroduction action sequence too, with Dom’s recalling the truck-jacking days of old in Los Angeles and Brian’s set-piece signaling the next change of direction and tone for the series. Whereas Lin took the neon-infused style of the first two films and jacked it up on steroids for Tokyo Drift, the director attempts to reignite the old L.A. spark by shaking off all the shallow surface details that the series became defined by.

Harsh blues, grays, and browns now define this updated world in place of the familiar colorful hues, but Lin struggles to maintain his sense of fun in this new “realistic” take. The movie practically begs the audience to take it seriously, and these characters may hold pathos between them but even they can’t shoulder the dramatic weight placed on them here. Everything is so grim that it’s difficult to find a smile in the humorless bro posturing. The stylistic shakeup isn’t all for naught though. Brian’s first chase sets the tone off on the right foot with such breathless pacing and choreography that you half expect Jason Bourne to come barreling through the scene. And while Vin Diesel doesn’t quite recapture the adventurous twinkle in Dom’s eye amidst the po-faced grimness, Paul Walker feels more comfortable in his role than he ever did before.

The movie also has a potentially worthwhile villain in Braga thanks to actor Jon Ortiz. It’s a shame that Braga is so underutilized, and with a twist as predictable as can be, since Ortiz later proved with Silver Linings Playbook that he’s a reliable character actor who can steal scenes from bigger stars with ease. He’s not in the picture long enough to truly make an impact but in a series that often struggles with creating strong villains he’s better than most of them. Our heroes also cross paths with series newcomer Giselle (played by Gal Gadot) in their quest for revenge against Braga, but she’s given little to do as well and her chemistry with Diesel is non-existent.

The movie occasionally springs back to life when it lets Lin cut loose in his toy car sandbox, and the director cooks up a mid-film race way more exciting than almost anything that Singleton and Cohen achieved in their Fast entries. But even the new series shepherd can’t help but fall into his predecessors’ missteps that he so gracefully dodged in his Tokyo outing. Lin mostly sticks to a do-it-all-for-real method of action until collapsing into a lengthy sequence of nothing but dimly lit cars driving through Playstation-level cave walls. His inconsistent work here reveals a franchise that still, four films in, hasn’t 100% found its central identity. Fast and Furious ends up stumbling further than it ever did before with its attempts to rekindle an old fire, and it doesn’t nearly prepare us for the dizzying heights that would follow.

The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006) Review

The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006)

Tokyo Drift finds itself in a precarious position in the Fast and Furious movie series. When Paul Walker declined to return, the production wiped the slate clean with an entirely new cast and crew that almost completely ignored the previous two installments. This paved the way for director Justin Lin and writer Chris Morgan’s partnership to bend the movies to their creative wills for four straight entries. It’s also a bridge film of sorts between the grittier action movie approach of the later Fast films and the earlier, more colorful racing-focused phase of the series. Tokyo Drift represents both the end times (almost literally, considering its low box office) and the beginning of a new era, the first indication being that Lin and Morgan crafted by far the best movie in the series yet at that point in time.

Tokyo Drift is essentially the Halloween 3 of Fast and Furious movies: shunned by fans at the time of its release for not featuring the old characters, and then later accepted as a cult favorite. It takes the same combination of oversized egos and machismo and transplants them to a new setting where they feel right at home: high school. If The Fast and the Furious was Point Break and 2 Fast 2 Furious was Miami Vice, then Tokyo Drift is the Karate Kid of the series. Southern boy protagonist Sean Boswell (Lucas Black) is an outsider even in his hometown, and with a 1971 Monte Carlo as his early car of choice the movie establishes from the start that he’s a gear hound amongst a bunch of wannabe chest-pumpers.

 

But the movie serves as a subtle subversion of the series’ sense of bravado by having Sean mess up…a lot. Even when he beats the asshole jock in the opening he still ends up wrecking his car, and up until late in the game Sean’s ego is consistently brought down notches once he’s shipped off to Tokyo to live with his father and to quit racing. Of course he doesn’t quit, because there needs to be a movie, and he ends up losing badly to local racing celebrity “D.K.” (Drift King). Despite this, he catches the eye of racer Han Seoul-Oh (just roll with it). Han is an anomaly in this crowd; he doesn’t engage with the boasting attitude that permeates this mini-society, often standing to the side eating his snacks while everyone else talks their heads off.

Han is the true standout of Tokyo Drift, and much of this can be attributed to Sung Kang’s nonchalantly cool performance. He doesn’t need to say much because he knows that he can walk the walk while everyone else is too busy throwing horribly written insults at each other (the dialogue may debatably be the worst in the series, which is quite an accomplishment), and his Zen-master training helps Sean become a better racer. With all-due respect to the late Paul Walker, Lucas Black is a much more charismatic lead for these movies, capturing the cowboy fun and excitement of shifting into high gear and barreling through the neon-lit streets of Tokyo.

What pushes this particular Fast and Furious over the edge as one of the best in the series is the sense that Lin and Morgan are having fun with the material too. This is immediately apparent in the action sequences, each of which is different and wilder than the last and display a greater sense of rhythm than any seen in the previous movies. Lin’s set pieces crackle with reckless energy, particularly during an escape from D.K.’s goons and the final race along the winding mountainside roads. The addition of drifting into the mix is mostly just window dressing, though it allows for much more exciting scenarios than simple drag races. Lin’s more straightforward style is less reliant on gimmicky tricks to translate the adrenaline rush to his audience, letting the frenzied editing and camera do the work on their own.

The director understands how to project the thrill of racing better than his predecessors did, and it’s not hard to see why his and Morgan’s partnership on this series lasted for four movies straight. They understand that driving is in the blood of these characters; they live and breathe it. Sean’s romance with local schoolgirl Neela is best expressed not with words but when she takes him for a graceful ride along the countryside. Due to this and other factors, Tokyo Drift is arguably the only movie of the bunch that, at its heart, is truly about racing. Even the first and second movies owe themselves more to their crime genre influences than gear head classics such as Gone in 60 Seconds (1974), and when Sean finally owns up to his poor decisions to D.K.’s gangster father (martial artist Sonny Chiba), their agreement boils down to one final race to settle the rivalry.

The characters are played straight but the tone of their adventure is done with a subtle nudge and wink (Bow Wow’s annoying sidekick Twinkie literally winks at the camera when he enters an elevator full of women). The backdrop of Tokyo provides a colorful playground for the characters to roam in, and Lin relishes in the cartoonish little details of the racing world like Twinkie’s tricked-out Incredible Hulk car. The term “car porn” has often been applied to these movies and that has never been more true than here, basking in the sleek edges of international sports cars while admiring the raw power of American muscle. Tokyo Drift is about the bridging of cultures and worlds across the sea, all of which is given a nice bowtie when Vin Diesel’s Dominic Toretto shows up at the end to race Sean, a nice acknowledgement that the movie is not just The Fast and the Furious in name only. It would be a shame to toss the movie aside because of its hard-swerve into a new direction for the franchise, one that would set the course for the insane heights to come.

2 Fast 2 Furious (2003) Review

2 Fast 2 Furious (2003)

Note: Check out my original 2009 review to see how much of a better writer I am now

2 Fast 2 Furious is exactly the type of sequel that one would expect to come from a movie such as The Fast and the Furious. There are more cars, more racing scenes, more beautiful women, and more dumb sequel titling. It’s the type of sequel that replicates the shiny surface details that defined the first movie without trying anything new or even understanding why that movie resonated on some level with its audience. The Fast and the Furious is not particularly good even by action movie standards, though it still merits a spot in the genre’s annals for the niche world it created and Vin Diesel’s authoritative role. Now with Diesel off working on his other iconic role, this 2 dumb 2 care sequel tries to keep cruising along a yet-to-be-defined series path even as it doubles down on the elements that didn’t work out last time.

With only Paul Walker returning to his part as Brian O’Connor, 2 Fast serves as a soft restart that allows for newcomers who can jump right in without missing a beat and also returning fans who want to see where undercover cop Brian’s story goes after letting Diesel’s Dominic Toretto ride off to freedom. He’s now fully integrated into the racing subculture on the Miami front with a whole new group of friends to call his own, including future “Fast and Furious Avengers” member Tej Parker. Knowing that Fast Five would fold back Ludacris’ character (and others) into the series got me wondering: why stop there? I say Devon Aoki’s Suki and her pink ride are long overdue for a return call, especially since she gets more to do and say than Letty did in installment one and yet I haven’t seen her get a death/revenge/resurrection storyline. (Spoiler?)

It’s a new world with a new director in John Singleton but done with the same old tricks, even the ones that failed before. The digital effects found in The Fast and the Furious’ opening drag race were excessive but Singleton, perhaps due to his lack of experience in action movies, pushes them to a higher, much more obtrusive degree. Not content to simply let the cars’ power and speed speak for themselves, the director opens the movie with a race through the Miami streets that’s filled with distractingly digital camera movements and unconvincing computer-generated vehicles. Even the sequence’s money shot, where Brian’s car flies over an opponent’s on a drawbridge, loses all impact due to its obviously faked nature. Real cars doing real stunts are viscerally exciting; fake cars doing fake stunts are just video game cut scenes.

One of the few set pieces that is mostly free of these distractions is a memorably crunchy race around the Miami highways so that drug kingpin Carter Verone can pick a couple of drivers for his operations. If the first movie was glorified Point Break redo then this one does the same for Miami Vice, complete with corrupt cops, undercover cops, loose cannon (ex)cops, and angry chief cops. It’s also written more in line with the buddy cop genre along the likes of Lethal Weapon rather than the serious crime thriller tone of the previous movie, bringing in Tyrese Gibson as Brian’s estranged old friend Roman Pearce. Brian and Roman’s reluctant alliance brings forth a history of bottled tension and also possibly the greatest repressed gay action movie romance since Maverick and Iceman played volleyball.

 

Their charged banter together is so laced with unintentional innuendo and Roman’s resentment of Brian’s attraction to undercover FBI agent Monica Fuentes is so strong that it’s hard not to pick up on it. But there’s no time for love when they’ve got to take down Verone for the FBI men that hired them to infiltrate the operation. The clearer goals give the movie a tighter focus and momentum than the slippery plotting of Rob Cohen’s entry, but they’re undercut by Cole Hauser’s apathetic performance as the lead villain. Hauser, who coincidentally costarred with Vin Diesel in Pitch Black, hits the same low pitch growl note for his personality-less performance in every scene, sapping away any sense of menace to the heroes. Mendes fares only slightly better given the lack of real material written for her, and yet she’s arguably more useful to the plot than any other female in the series until part six.

Walker and Gibson’s tense friendship (possibly more?) is the real backbone that keeps the movie going through its rough patches, and their chemistry together brings out a looser side to Walker’s performance that was previously missing. The free-wheeling sunny spirit of the movie itself is a virtue too as it moves along at a fast clip all the way up to its sprawling climax across the streets and swamps of Miami. But apart a Dukes of Hazzard-esque car jump 2 Fast 2 Furious is lacking in memorable values, and with a visual style that screams “USA Original Series” it loses the underworld mystique of its predecessor. Its biggest lasting merits wouldn’t come until years later when Fast Five brought Mendes (briefly), Tyrese and Ludacris back into the mix, so it is important to the franchise in a roundabout way, but as its own entity the movie lacks inspiration to stand out.

The Fast and the Furious (2001) Review

The Fast and the Furious (2001)

Note: Check out my original 2009 review to see how much of a better writer I am now

The dirty little secret of the Fast and Furious series is that they were never really about the cars they so proudly displayed. Writer Gary Scott Thompson used the Vibe Magazine article “Racer X” as an inspiration for the first installment, but the series has proven itself to be a strange and ever-changing beast since entering the pop culture landscape 14 years ago. And then there’s the popular, rather true notion that the original movie is basically just Point Break with cars instead of surfboards, and we never talk about Point Break as a surfing movie. The Fast movies are an often lost and yet bizarrely coherent collection of pieces that have adapted to extenuating circumstances over time into something bigger and altogether more interesting than originally envisioned.

However, to understand the context of its zigzagging evolution we need to return to the beginning. The characters of The Fast and the Furious live apart from the rest of us with their unique world that’s powered by magically ready-made rolls of cash, a little elbow grease, and a lot of attitude. The movie presents a clear distinction between the “normal” world and the nightlife racing culture as the sun sets and the flashy neon cars light up the streets. Director Rob Cohen lovingly pans his camera across these cars with as much fetishistic glee as he does the scantily clad women that cling to the drivers like rock band groupies. Cohen and Thompson create this insular microcosm of people that all know each other and the code of respect that defines them, so when Paul Walker’s Brian O’Connor presses his way into this circle he immediately stands out like bleached-blonde sore thumb.

Walker’s severe stiffness as an actor almost works for the character; sometimes it’s hard to tell in the early scenes whether Walker is just trying to pull off a convincing line delivery or if the actor is playing this up to emphasize the undercover cop’s weariness. Walker’s lack of screen presence, intentional or not, is put into perspective every time he shares a scene with Vin Diesel’s Dominic Toretto. Before we even get to know Dom, Cohen and Thompson lay the bricks for his legend status in the racing community. Cohen stages his introduction in such a way that we already understand the type of person he is before Diesel opens his mouth. With his back turned to the camera and two crossed shotguns adorning the office wall, Dom is immediately established as the outlaw figure who only enters trouble when absolutely necessary.

In Diesel’s hands Dom is the ideal image of macho bravado without the toxic impulsiveness that undoes many of the other characters in this society, including those in his own crew. Even as the Fast movies found their voice late in life, their baritone lead actor never quite recaptured the same level of charisma he displayed here. The hyper-macho attitude extends to everyone else in the movie, with every guy trying to one-up each other in races and insults. So pervasive is the movie’s manly nature that one of its few prominent females, Michelle Rodriguez’s Letty, is so masculine that she takes the phrase “just one of the guys” to another level.

The only sensible way for these people to vent themselves is through the thrill of underground street racing, a life so in-tuned to their desires that they might be able to describe the accessories of their cars faster than Cohen can montage them. But Cohen has a few tools of his own; his computer-assisted journeys into the car engines have become a trademark element of the series. A character’s press of the NOS button is more than just a little boost, it’s an intricate mini roller coaster that gets to the literal heart of these speed machines and provides the movie’s audience with an adrenaline shot of their own. Cohen pushes the effects to such a degree in the first drag race that the cars feel like they’re gliding more on pixels than pavement as he relies too much on green screen effects when real driving would have worked to better effect.

This is certainly true with the botched truck robbery that comes right as everything starts falling to pieces for both the characters and the increasingly haphazard plot momentum. When looking at the larger set pieces to follow in the sequels, this sequence is rather stripped back in comparison, and to its advantage. Dom, against his better judgment, tries to save resident asshole crewmate Vince from the shotgun-wielding driver, whose faceless presence gives him an otherworldly quality, recalling the sinister and also unseen villain of Steven Spielberg’s classic Duel. The entire sequence is accomplished with nary a trace of digital trickery, allowing the tension to build naturally through a series of close-calls, daring maneuvers, and Dom’s refusal to let his friend go.

This drives at the heart of what this tight knit group of people is all about, which is the binding force of family. For all it’s races and clashes, of which there’s surprisingly little of for an action movie, The Fast and the Furious is much more concerned with its bromantic bonds and attitude than it is about getting the adrenaline pumping, which works both for and against itself. Like any outlaws, Dom and his crew live by a code; it’s just that this code is often expressed through the simple pleasures of a Corona and some barbeque with mates.  The outlandish world of street racing is made human, even as it retains its ridiculous nature with earnestly acted nonsensical dialogue such as, “I live my life a quarter mile at a time.” Try as it might, words and convincing emotion aren’t the movie’s strong suits.

This presents a problem later on when the drama feels like it should be hitting a peak and yet stalls out repeatedly in the third act. The plot continuously pivots around its multiple threads and never manages to bring them together in a cohesive fashion, leaving the disjointed climax to fizzle out before it can generate real excitement. The final drag race between Brian and Dom feels like a forced attempt to provide closure, especially when the impending threat of Brian’s LAPD superiors turns out to be a total non-starter. The perfect analogy for The Fast and the Furious is Brian’s first street race experience: he has the right tools and just enough bluster to carry himself through, but he sputters out wildly before hitting the finish line, leaving a trail of smoke and little else to show for it.