Fun if fairly mindless action flick

Rating: 7/10 (12 November 2015)

Brian O'Connor is a Los Angeles police officer who is working undercover to discover the identity of a group involved in a series of truck hijackings. To this end he tries to get in with the street racing community. To do this he will not only need to take part in the races he will have to impress the other racers. His bosses are convinced that one Dominic Toretto is behind the crimes but as Brian gets to know him he becomes less sure and is soon convinced that a group of Chinese racers are the ones involved is this really the case or of Brian becoming a bit too friendly with Toretto? He has also fallen for Toretto's beautiful sister which leads to some friction with another one of the group who also has the hots for her.
If you are looking for the 'Citizen Kane' of action movies this isn't it; however if you just want some good mindless fun with fast cars and a good looking cast you could do much worse. Early on I thought this would just be 'Point Break' with street racers instead of surfers in many ways it is but there are as many differences as similarities. As one might expect there are a succession of action set pieces; this include several races, fights, shootings and a spectacular truck robbery that goes horribly wrong. These are pretty exciting even if they are a bit unrealistic at times an example of this is the truck hijacking; it takes place on what appears to be a main road but we don't see a single other vehicle for the entire scene if you can ignore this sort of thing this shouldn't detract from the film. The cast might not be Oscar contenders but the do a solid job. Overall this is a solid enough brain-in-neutral action film.