Fast and the Furious? How about Lame and Curious...

Rating: 2/10 (28 January 2002)

Well folks, I thought I'd see an entertaining film.. What I saw instead was The Fast and the Furious... This movie should have been Gone in 60 Seconds, maybe it should have been put out of its misery with a Bullitt... Hmmm, Deathrace 2000 would have been more humane...
Anyway, I thought his movie would have brought back some of my own feelings of blacktop mayhem (hmmm, should I copyright that? Blacktop Mayhem.... Could be next summers Fast and the Furious, eh?)... Tooling around town in my turbocharged Daytona, sometimes I get the same feeling I used to get when my ground pounding '69 SuperBee belched fire and roared thunder from its 383 Magnum...
What I got instead was a lame excuse to show a bunch of imported pocket rockets burning up the road... The street race scene, supposedely a 1/4 mile race (but never actually stated to be such) took much, MUCH longer than the accelerated film speed would indicate. Heck, it seemed like a full mile... I've seen races at Belmont run faster than this! Oh, wait, and we're supposed to believe that our hero is able to operate TWO computer interfaces for his fuel management system and GPS locator (okay, that's a joke, but hell, so is his movie) while he's blasting down the road at over 140 mph, FOUR abreast! Not me, baby, I'm gonna have MY eyes glued to the road and those OTHER idiots!
I almost, ALMOST got interested in this movie when they started to try to develop a plot. Okay, so Brian's a cop, he's undercover, and Dom and Trang are under suscpicion for truck hijacking... The Feds are involved, they want the hijacking stopped before the truckers start arming themselves for vigilante justice. Boys and girls, trucker vigilante justice (hmmmm, another nice phrase for a summer movie) would have been MUCH more entertaining - as witnessed by the scene when one of our hapless hijackers is pinned down by a faceless shotgun wielding trucker...
OH, and wait... At the end of the movie... Well, I won't spoil it (the movie itself does a passable job of doing that), our "hero" performs an action that is SO out of character, that is SO anti-reality as to cause one to sit in one's chair with his mouth hanging in disbelief... Are we to actually believe that a cop, sworn to uphold the law, who's every movement has been scrutinized by not only his superiors and the FBI is going to act in the way he did after the final action sequence? I think not.
Save yourself a lot of grief and a little expense. Do NOT buy this movie unless you see it on the $5.99 rack. Wait for it to come out on cable... Trust me...