Well, color me surprised. For the last ten years, I'd given at best a disinterested gaze in the direction of The Fast and the Furious and its sequels; they seemed like stupid "street racing" movies with fast cars that had (as Clint Eastwood so eloquently put it in Gran Torino) "faggy spoilers" and stupid paint jobs. I was a Vin Diesel fan from Pitch Black (and later, xXx), but that wasn't enough to overcome the charisma vacuum that was Paul Walker, and I really could care less about neon green, nitro-injected, tricked out cars tearing down city streets.
Street racing never really appealed to me in any form or fashion, and generally reminded me of the mouth breathers in high school that needed everybody to know how cool they were with their loud muffler kits and off the line peeling out. So yeah, you could say I didn't want to have anything to do with The Fast and the Furious, 2 Fast 2 Furious, or The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. Hell, I didn't really care about Diesel's return to the series in Fast & Furious - so what?
I mean, look at that poster: see the tagline? New Model. Original Parts? Are you kidding me with that garbage? Why would I want to watch these movies if it's all about macho car racing and jargon about kits and injection systems and everything else I just don't care about? Couldn't I just watch Bullitt or The French Connection, movies with actual stories? Or hell, if not, why not one of the Transporter films? Those have Jason Statham in them, and we all know that's a plus.
But then something crazy happened: Fast Five. Normally, I wouldn't care about the fifth movie in a series I already wasn't going to see, but returning director Justin Lin and Universal had an ace up their sleeve: Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. If you know Cap'n Howdy, then you know I've seen almost every Dwayne Johnson movie not aimed at children: The Scorpion King, The Rundown, Walking Tall, Doom, Gridiron Gang, Southland Tales, and his cameos in Reno 911!: Miami and The Other Guys. Hell, I even saw Faster, and hated it, but was happy to see Johnson in a movie not released by Walt Disney.
When someone adds The Rock as Vin Diesel's adversary, I'll pay attention. It didn't hurt that Fast Five was getting better than I thought was possible word of mouth from critics, and that it was being likened less to a racing movie than to a testosterone laden Ocean's Eleven. So I decided that it would be a good idea to check it out. That just meant deciding whether I needed to watch the other four movies first.
I settled on watching Fast & Furious instead, as it directly leads into Fast Five, and because I'd picked up enough from the internet to understand who the characters were and their relationships. Brian O'Conner (Walker) is an FBI agent on the trail of a mysterious drug lord named Braga. Dominic Toretto (Diesel) is a muscle car enthusiast and thief who has too much heat on him and needs to lay low. When Dom's girlfriend Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) is killed by Braga's sidekick Fenix (Laz Alonso), he comes looking for revenge, and crosses paths with O'Conner, who infiltrated his gang years ago but didn't arrest him. O'Conner also hooked up with Mia (Jordana Brewster), Toretto's sister, so that's a sore spot between the two. Brian's FBI team, led by Penning (Jack Conley), Trinh (Liza Lapira), and Stasiak (Shea Whigham) are trying to bring down Braga, but also want Toretto, and Brian is torn between his loyalty to the agency and his respect for Dom.
There's only one "street racing" scene in Fast & Furious, and it actually serves the plot in such a way that I can't really complain about it. Dom and Brian are called in by Braga's right hand man Campos (John Ortiz) for a race to test their skills as drug runners, along with a few other soon-to-be dead guys with quickly sketched out personalities. The race, along with most of the other car chases and stunts in the film, are well shot and structured by Lin and editors Fred Raskin and Christian Wagner, and for the most part are practical instead of heavy on cgi trickery. The exception to that are a series of tunnel shots that I'm not sure would be possible practically, so I'll give that a pass. Overall I have to say I was much more impressed than I thought I would be - Fast & Furious may not be Bullitt or The French Connection as car chases go, but it's certainly up there with The Italian Job and probably better than the Transporter films.
I guess it's easy to poke fun at overly macho films and say that two guys who respect each other are actually looking for a shot to jump the other one's bone, but I didn't get that vibe from Fast & Furious. If I understand it correctly, 2 Fast 2 Furious is ludicrously homoerotic, but Fast & Furious seems more about Brian and Dom trying to navigate their status as "cop and criminal" and which is which at times. I didn't ever get the impression that just because Brian is obsessed with beating Toretto in a race that he wanted to kiss him or anything, but I'm sure somebody will be happy to correct me for missing that subtext. Riggs and Murtaugh were hot for each other too, and Thunderbolt and Lightfoot I guess. Guys can't be friends any more, since Freudian analysis slithered its way out of classrooms and into "guy movie" breakdowns.
Anyway, so Vin Diesel was the Vin Diesel I remember from Pitch Black - the stoic guy who doesn't need help and comes through in the clutch, and while I don't think I've ever seen a Paul Walker movie before*, I didn't find him to be a personality-less bore like the Sam Worthingtons or the Channing Tatum's of current action movie. He didn't exactly stand out or anything, but he's good at the "serious face while driving" kind of acting that this movie required, so that's cool. Jordana Brewster and Michelle Rodriguez don't really get to do a lot in this movie, but I guess they were fine for not having seen the first movie. I guess I should mention Sung Kang, who appears at the beginning of the film as Han, a character that died in The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, making this a prequel. I mention this because he figures prominently into Fast Five, along with Ludacris and Tyrese Gibson (from 2 Fast 2 Furious).
So I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised by Fast & Furious and am looking forward to seeing Fast Five now. I can't promise that I'm going to watch the first three movies (that's asking a little much if you ask me), but then again I didn't really picture myself seeing, let alone enjoying, Fast & Furious two years ago. I guess you can teach and old dog new tricks, unless the trick insists on interpreting every case of male bonding through a homoerotic lens - I'm looking at you, Frodo and Samwise. You're not fooling anybody...
Post-Script: For the point of clarification, I'm not trying to imply that there's no such thing as male bonding in film that does include sexual overtones, or that I really care when that is the case. By including a semi-anti-gay slur at the outset of the review (which is actually what Clint Eastwood uses to describe the spoilers he hates on cars) and voicing my frustration at this "if two guys are friends in a movie, they must be gay" trend that started out as a subversion of "guy movies," for reasons I'm not really sure need to exist (is it supposed to rattle the security of hyper-aggressive, macho guys? To push them out of their "comfort zone" and imply that their movies have an agenda contradictory to their own?). It's not that the notion isn't worth exploring, but to apply it to everything, including Back to the Future, doesn't actually help make the case - it undermines the concept by stretching the analysis to fit when it makes no sense. At a certain point it becomes almost as much fun as digging for Freudian overtones in every single horror movie, even when the evidence is flimsy at best. I do think that you can actually just be two guys (or two girls) that respect each other and work together to find a common goal without secretly being into each other, and ignoring that for the sake of making a point about "macho" movies undermines when it actually is the subtext. So yeah, that's about it. Please correct the Cap'n if you need to.
* Strike that - I've seen Joy Ride, which I liked, and Pleasantville, which I guess I forgot he was in.
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