04/30/09 - Fast & Furious

Fast & Furious (2009, 107 min)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1013752/

We get the fourth (third?) movie in the Fast and Furious series. I'm not really sure if The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift is really in the series or not. Anyway, The Fast and the Furious was good and 2 Fast 2 Furious was pretty bad. I didn't see Tokyo Drift.

We return to having the main characters being Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and Brian O'Conner (Paul Walker) along with side characters Letty Ortiz (Michelle Rodriguez) and Mia Toretto (Jordana Brewster) though they get significantly less screen time in this installment. Toretto and O'Conner are after drug movers Fenix Rise (Laz Alonso) and Campos / Braga (John Ortiz) respectively. Toretto wants revenge for Rise's murder of Letty while O'Conner wants to catch the drug lord Braga as per his job.

The movie really seems to alternate between taking itself seriously and having a plot and then forgetting the plot completely in favor of crazy action. However, the plot is believable to an extent (the plot of 2 Fast 2 Furious was atrocious) and is handled fairly well in my opinion. The problem, though, is the action scenes. They seem to be more in line with what we saw in 2 Fast 2 Furious and not what was in The Fast and the Furious. Maybe the people in charge thought that there could only be so much excitement in quarter-mile races. There's a few races in this installment but they don't have the passion as in the first movie.

The cars could also be considered actors in and of themselves in this type of movie. We get lots of pretty ones here, with Toretto's Dodge Charger and O'Conner's Nissan Skyline being the best in my opinion. The Charger showcases the same thunderous power we saw in the first movie and it's a shame that it gets blown up near the end (though O'Conner is driving a similar model in the very final scene). I also liked that there seemed to be more a mix of American and import models in this movie as opposed to the more import-dominated first movie.

Overall, I gave this film a 5/10. It was average and not nearly as good as The Fast and the Furious. It carried it's plot well but the action scenes were a little over-the-top and lacking.

[Note: Due to a voting update, I have changed the rating of Fast & Furious to a 04/10.]