Fast & Furious - The Fast & The Tedious

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I remember watching The White Shadow as a kid.  It starred Ken Howard as Ken Reeves, a retired NBA player who becomes a basketball coach at a predominately African-American high school.  It was a good show but it fell into a rut of sorts.  It seemed that no matter what problems his students faced, Reeves would find a way to solve them by challenging someone to a pick-up game of one-on-one.

His star center owes money to a local bookie?  “Perchance we can settle this on the court, good sir?”

Back-up point guard gets caught shoplifting?  “I bet I can dribble a ball longer than you can, officer.”

Power forward battles restless leg syndrome?  “Who wants to play H.O.R.S.E.?”

Granted, I haven’t seen an episode of The White Shadow in twenty-plus years.  But that’s how the show lives on in my memory.  (Who knows, this could all be based on a Mad Magazine parody I read when I was college, high scho…um, grade school.)  The Fast & Furious franchise is rapidly turning into The White Shadow except instead of basketball, everything is somehow resolved via street racing.

In the latest installment, Fast & Furious (this version has no “the” – it’s so “fast and/or furious” there’s no time for definite articles), Vin Diesel returns as street-racer extraordinaire Dom.  Dom and former partner/rival Brian (Paul Walker) are attempting to avenge the death of a mutual friend by infiltrating a drug ring that uses street racers to movie heroin across the Mexico/U.S. border. 

There you go.  That’s the plot.

What’s odd is that for a movie so light on story, it doesn’t really fill the gaps with very much racing.  I mean, that’s what we’re here for right?  Nobody really cares about the plot.  I’ve seen porn with more intricate plots.  Well, I haven’t “seen” them…I mean, I’ve heard that maybe some porn…ah, forget it.

The opening scene consists of stealing gas from a moving tanker.  Why while it’s moving?  Because how else are they going to do stunts?  Ignore the fact that you could just wait until the guy stops for a potty break and shove a gun in his face.  In this movie, everything must be accomplished via racing regardless of how many other, simpler ways immediately come to mind. 

You would think that a movie targeted to people whose wardrobe consists entirely of Affliction and Tapout t-shirts would have more action.  You would be wrong.  It’s not a good sign when forty-five minutes into a Fast & Furious movie, the most exciting chase has been on foot.  The movie is just one ridiculous excuse for a race/chase after another.  The problem is: they spend more time constructing elaborate reasons for racing than they spend actually racing.  For instance, the drug cartel is using street racers to move heroin across the border.  Apparently the best way to do this is to have people compete for said job via a high-profile, illegal street race that takes place amidst evening rush hour.  The winner will then use his or her muscle car to smuggle drugs into the country via car-width tunnels that have been bored into the mountains separating the two countries.  Has our economy gotten so bad that Mexicans won’t even bring drugs across the border anymore?

Credit where credit is due: the tunnel driving is exciting.  Think Bullitt meets The Descent (minus the zombies, of course).  But other than that, Fast & Furious is a convoluted mess of a movie.  My expectations were low and it couldn’t even deliver on that.  The dialogue is laughable and all of the actors seem to be stuck on “brooding”.  One doesn’t expect much from a movie like this other than cheap thrills and it couldn’t even muster that.

On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being Bullitt and 1 being Death Race, Fast & Furious gets a 5.

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