Underwhelming from Beginning to End

Rating: 3/10 (6 December 2014)

Set in Los Angeles, The Fast and the Furious follows Paul Walker's character, an up-and-coming street racer whose cocky antics land him in a race he loses. After saving Dom (Vin Diesel), who is in charge of a small group of racers and owns a garage, the two become good friends. Paul Walker is actually an undercover cop trying to get evidence against these racers as many of them attack trucks on highways and steal their cargo.
What sounds like an exciting plot is ruined by lackluster pacing and, at least for me, a lack of excitement. Cars, guns, tits, a pointless shot of two girls kissing, beer. It's all the kind of things that fourteen year old boys tend to masturbate too. And that's not to say the film is childish (which, let's face it, it kind of is) but it is built to appeal to a crowd that I don't belong to. The actual racing of the film is drag racing, which does not translate to exciting pieces of action. Driving in a straight line toward a finish line and pressing a button for nitro is not fun to watch and I felt the opening drag race between Walker and Diesel had some pretty poor directing. It looked obviously sped up and I can understand it was done that way to actually allow us to see the cars, but it looks pretty stupid.
As far as characters go Brian O' Conner (Walker) is as boring as they get. The romance between himself and Dom's sister could be interesting for character interactions if the characters themselves were worth anything. Dom himself is cool if only because he's supposed to be. You can easily dismiss every character here as none are truly worth remembering.
And then there is the pacing I mentioned before. It starts off moving at a decent clip but slows dramatically in the middle. The final twenty minutes are a mishmash of endings with a climactic scene on the highway followed by a climactic chase through the streets of LA and finalized with a climactic (and pretty pointless) scene of drag racing. There are some loose ends that needed to be tied by the end, but it's done pretty poorly and doesn't feel organic. It just feels like the writer wanted to jump from here to here to here with nothing to lead to that next scene.
The Fast and the Furious is pretty dumb and juvenile, with really nothing to offer aside from a few sweet cars. It's a lackluster film that you'd be best off watching on TV.