MOVIE REVIEW: "FAST AND THE FURIOUS"

FAST & FURIOUS

By: Lee Rice

Fast cars, beautiful women, and Vin Diesel in a role from the days before he was reduced to doing dreck like Babylon A.D.

What’s not to like?

Everything else.

‘Fast & Furious’ lives up to its title, packing its run time with frenetically-shot car chases that are admittedly a cut above other action fare that I’ve seen lately, but real problems arise when the film fails to deliver any real character development or a decent story.

This, the fourth installment in the series, picks up where the second film left off, with Paul Walker and Vin Diesel’s characters reuniting after the murder of one of their friends in a botched drug-trafficking scheme. Both parties want to bring down the killer, but after the events of the first film, which revealed Paul Walker to be an undercover agent, Diesel’s character is reluctant to trust him.

I’d tell you more about the plot, but that’s basically it. You’d think that two characters with this much history, who became as close as brothers before Walker’s identity was revealed, would provide a perfect hotbed for conflict, and that the film would explore how these two men now despise one another, only to come together against a common enemy. Instead, we get an hour and a half of them engaging what amounts to a cinematic staring contest.

There are a few moments where tempers flare, but there’s not nearly enough of a rift between the characters to make me buy the story for even an instant. I mean, how would you feel if you met the person who had forced you to flee the United States, who had forced you out of your home, who had broken your sister’s heart and had a hand in the death of one of your friends?

I don’t know how you’d react, but you sure as shit wouldn’t have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to say to him.

I don’t know who wrote this, but it’s nearly criminal to take a premise this promising, and refuse to have any debate whatsoever between two characters who have every right in the world to be completely conflicted about how they feel about one another.

Both actors do a decent job, but their roles are so bland that they might as well have not bothered to show up.

In the end, this movie is a bunch of sound and fury signifying nothing at all.

You can e-mail Lee at leslierice60@webster.edu