Sunday 10 May 2009

Fast and Furious


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There are times when a movie can be fully overshadowed by its trailer - Miami Vice is one, X-Men3 is another, (although the flaws in that movie will haunt for the rest of my time in this life and the next). Fast and Furious is one of those movies. The trailer far exceeds the movie in terms of action, acting and excitement. 

I have to make it clear I didn’t like The Fast and The Furious, I have never even seen 2 Fast 2 Furious but I loved Tokyo Drift but there I was on opening night in a completely packed out screen one.

The movie starts off so well, straight into the action with a good car heist. Then the action stops for what seems like forever so that we can get the obligatory back story of this movies villain. This is a normal process in any movie but Fast and Furious’ main flaw was that its two male leads cannot act. They look good running, they look good when they are driving, they look bad-ass when they are frowning but for the love of god don’t give either of them more than two lines of dialogue per scene!! 

After some awful awful scenes with dialogue we were treated to the second of (only!) four car scenes in the entire movie. The race scene should have been filled with great driving stunts and action but it was broken up to much with bad cutting, the insertion of strange CGI mapping effects and was narrated by Sally Frickin’ Sat-Nav. I’m sure Johnny-Special-Effects loved making the road map for the audience to follow but seriously, stick to the driving - giving the audience a heads up that Vin Diesel and Paul Walker should take the “next right”really just took away from the excitement of the scene. 

The dialogue was woefully written and wasn’t helped by the cast who really should be seen and not heard. The wittiest quips were sexualised car innuendos but that was to be expected but the smug look on Vin Diesel face every time he uttered one was like watching a monkey figure out how to use a knife and fork. For the love of god Vin you make a reasonable action hero but do not kid yourself you can act or are in the slightest bit amusing.

The plot didn’t matter. I love my movies but when I go to see an action movie I expect action. I don’t expect, especially given the acting talent that we had the pleasure of watching, proceedings to be taken too seriously. Fast and Furious wasn’t supposed to believe it was a serious drug crime movie...it was supposed to be an action movie with lots of good car scenes. There were to many gaps between action scenes and these were mostly filled with the most unbelievable bunch of FBI agents, including Paul Walker and some rather amusing scenes of Vin Diesel trying to portray emotion….

When the driving scenes came they were quite good, although nothing original was to be seen anywhere on screen and judging by the imaginative title idea of just dropping the “the’s” I don’t know why I was surprised. The cars, of course where the most gorgeous items on screen, that’s right the cars, even those that had exploded and were in flames still had more screen presence than Paul Walker could only ever dream of having.

The cars stole the show and when the cars were actually allowed to race they were awesome. 

I would give the movie 5/10. If it wasn’t for the fact that the cars were fantastic I would’ve been out of there. Skip Fast and Furious and go straight onto Tokyo Drift which had better action, better actors and had at least the common decency to embrace the fact that it was a movie about cars and fun and not pretend to be a drama with a few car scenes thrown in.

Fast and Furious failed its MOT. See Vin you aren’t the only one who can make a car pun.

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