Fast and Furious
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1/5
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Starring Jordana Brewster, Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez ‘amp; Paul Walker
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Directed by Justin Lin
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Rated R
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It begins promisingly enough: butch bad-girl Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) and racially ambiguous hunk o’ man meat Dominic (Vin Diesel) attempt to hijack an oil truck that’s hurtling across a treacherous mountain range somewhere in South America.
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One thing leads to another, and the truck catapults off the highway, exploding into a million pieces and nearly devouring our duo with flames ‘mdash; but that’s when Dominic puts pedal to metal, zooming past all the smoke and ashes and cuing the flashy title, followed by two hours of high-octane, seizure-inducing inanity.
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Unlike its streamlined predecessor ‘The Fast and the Furious,’ which depicted L.A. street racing as the modern, bootylicious return of the spaghetti Western to become 2001’s fanboy phenomenon, its comeback kid plays more like a soap opera on steroids. Diesel wields moralistic woes, doubting whether he’s really a ‘good’ guy after all, and Paul Walker’s chiseled visage proves too chiseled to actually express more than one emotion.
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Director Justin Lin stretches the cast’s drama-club posturing just long enough to ensure an intense crash from our adrenaline high. Rather than the anticipated barrage of auto-fetishism and long legs, we’re forced to reflect on dim vestiges of plot that are ultimately nonessential to the film’s banking points: senseless violence and hot chicks.
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It’s unfortunate, really, considering Lin’s former success on 2006’s ‘The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift,’ which brought shameless, testosterone-pumped indulgence to a new level.
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The fourth ‘Furious’ installment disbands the franchise’s original members with Letty’s premature offscreen death, which prompts fugitive ex-con Dominic ‘mdash; ripped and bald as ever ‘mdash; to put a vengeful beating on her murderer, who also happens to be one of the world’s biggest heroin smugglers. The quest reunites Dominic with fed gone foul Brian O’Conner (Walker), also hunting down the drug pusher. But before the chase can begin, Dom and Brian must first race each other (a trope diligently exhausted throughout the flick).
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The cars themselves are show-stealing character foils. Dom’s is an older, humbler model with its share of muscle and wear, while O’Conner gets his pick from the government’s line up of shiny, candy-colored brands. The vehicles bump and grind, garnering as many lustful ‘oohs’ from the audience as the film’s frequent, requisite booty shots, the whole shebang cut and pasted in breathless, machine-gun montages.
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The rest of the camerawork is slick and straightforward, alternating between a handheld, first-person perspective and zoomed-out views of glittering urban sprawl. Club- and border-hopping are equally disorienting, as we’re snaked through a labyrinth of dark corners, where either a French-kissing lesbian or angry Mexican is bound to be lurking.
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‘Furious’ clearly has its demographic appeal down to a science, spitting up every feasible MTV commodity in the form of an extended, ultra-streamlined commercial ‘mdash; one-liners and spank-bank material included. Even the street races are packaged with Grand Theft Auto’s CG-smoothed appeal.
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But it’s only when the film tries to become somewhat self-aware of its nonstop cockfest that the flick fails miserably. This is no Oscar contender; Diesel’s Dominic will never be Heath Ledger’s chilling Dark Knight. But that’s not the point. The point is guns and girls, and there will always be room for more guns and girls. Bring on the fifth installment already.
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