I blame the sound

Rating: Null/10 (1 March 2002)

Too loud. Any time there's a car (or motorbike) moving anywhere in the frame, we have to listen to a teeth-splintering metallic roar which doesn't get any louder or quieter - it just is. Like the people who provided the hideous music and rap chanting that makes up the soundtrack most of the rest of the time, the sound effects guys don't seem to understand that the value of dynamic contrast: if the roar of acceleration is preceded by silence, we FEEL the acceleration. If it's always that loud we just feel a mild throbbing pain around the ears.
Most of the speeding footage (there are one or two visual conceits that come off, and that final, utterly unmotivated chase towards the end is, I'll admit, exhilarating) is also all wrong. It's the modern vice: cut, cut, cut. If only the director had been willing to see just one of his shots through to the end. The computer-generated footage of car engines doesn't help, either.
-Oh, and the story is one of the most ludicrous I've ever encountered (sample: the roadsters who rob trucks, when they operate at night, are covered from head to toe so that they won't be recognised; when breaking the law in broad daylight, they scarcely wear anything, presumably because they want to be recognised by the audience) ... and I wanted to like the story, I really did. I even thought the basic situation was promising - as was the look and feel of the world in which the hero found himself. (Cinematography is excellent.) But the plotting is irredeemably silly, and what's worse, it gets in the way of the racing and the hotrod ambience and the views of Michelle Rodriguez and whatever else we were supposed to be looking at - just as they get in the way of the plotting.