Terrible

Rating: 4/10 (6 June 2002)

"The Fast and the Furious" is basically your standard summer blockbuster - stupid, loud, and lots of explosions. Amazingly, this movie sinks to depths that most summer blockbusters have never reached.
The story surrounds an undercover FBI agent (Paul Walker) who is trying to find out who has been stealing electronics equipment. This leads him to a group of underground street drag racers. Despite the numerous plot holes, such as the idiotic way in which the criminals go about stealing the equipment, and Walker's inexplicable behavior, this movie actually could've been good. The premise is interesting, and the drag racing scenes are fairly exciting.
Where this movie falters is the characters. None of them are interesting, and despite the script's best efforts, they are all two-dimensional. The performances are awful, with the exception of Vin Diesel, who is merely average. Walker delivers his stupid catch phrases inconvincingly monotone. Perhaps the script is much to blame here, for I've often believed that good performances are highly influenced by the script, i.e. a good actor can give a bad performance if the dialogue is bad. Well, anyway, the dialogue is simply some of the worst in any big budget movie I've seen recently.
On the plus side, the action sequences are pretty good. However, this simply cannot make up for a senseless script and horrible acting. Not really worth seeing, unless you really like action, with nothing to back it up.
* 1/2 out of ****