One of the 'better' cool car style-focused action flicks of the turn of the century

Rating: 6/10 (26 March 2017)

"The Fast and The Furious" was the "Point Break" of the 2000s — a cop goes undercover to bust up a group of criminals who are into a specific "sport," but he becomes attached to the very people he's trying to bust. "Point Break" is the better film, but "The Fast and the Furious" was the start of a multi-billion-dollar franchise. Go figure.
Paul Walker plays the cop, Brian O'Conner, but the screenplay doesn't reveal this card until Brian has not only won the respect of top street racer Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel), but also the viewer. This small betrayal of our trust is writer Gary Scott Thompson's shrewdest move as the film goes from somewhat interesting, albeit cliché, to more interesting, albeit cliché.
The screenplay — co-written with Erik Bergquist and David Ayer ("Training Day") based on the "VIBE" magazine article by Ken Li — is not the focal point of the movie, of course. This was 2001, the peak of the MTV Spring Break era. The point was to show hot foreign cars, hot foreign (and American) women and a lot of burning rubber. The rock, rap and techno music of the time feature prominently, and even rapper Ja Rule had a supporting role as a racer, a reminder of how the start of the 21st century was also the beginning of the music business starting to infiltrate the movie business.
All this to say, director Rob Cohen understands this is a style over substance situation. Quarter-mile races, chases, fist fights and criminal heist activity are the featured attractions — as are the beautiful cars and beautiful people. If this film can be given any credit for originality, it belongs to the merging of heist/crime movie and drag race aesthetics. Cars had of course been featured in movies and television before, but this movie more authentically plays to the car aficionado, as a handful of films did in this era (e.g. "Gone in 60 Seconds," "The Italian Job"). There's a certain grittiness that this film has featuring real street-racing cars compared to James Bond, for example, driving something too cool to believe.
The movie isn't 100 percent shallow from start to finish, however. A genuine effort is made to build chemistry between Walker and Diesel's characters. The story works best when it builds and tests that relationship. Nothing else about the movie feels worth our investment, but somehow we desperately do not want Brian and Dom to turn on each other despite all the reasons they should. Both Walker and Diesel bring likable dimensions to their characters and their chemistry is likely to be the bedrock of future films. (This coming from someone who has yet to see any of the other films yet.)
The supporting cast, however, doesn't offer much. Dom's girlfriend, Letty (Michelle Rodriguez), brings nothing to the story, and the other guys in Dom's gang aren't given the chance to be anything but meatheads. The romance between Brian and Dom's sister Mia (Jordana Brewster) exists for formulaic reasons, but the fact that both of them feel kind of like outsiders to the street-racing culture gives their relationships some legitimacy.
But enough about characters. "The Fast and the Furious" delivers some solid action sequences, especially the ones involving street cars and semi trucks. The racing scenes don't allow for much dimension, and the editing is decent to optimize suspense, but the CGI and green screen elements pull us out of what should feel like a very realistic, gritty street race.
There are enough quality moments for action fans in "The Fast and the Furious" to overcome the MTV Spring Break music video world its characters inhabit. The 2000s were full of glossy movies with inferior story lines, and while comparing "The Fast and the Furious" to these films would obviously make it seem like a great movie when in fact it's an average one, it could be a suitable enough ambassador of its time and culture to movie watchers of the future.
~Steven C
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