Here is the sum total of my knowledge about cars — spoilers look like tanning beds, manual is the only way to drive and when you pass a school bus you get five points. I don’t know where exactly these points are going but ideally I can cash them in for a toaster oven or a dinette set.
The other thing I know about cars is that movies about them are typically big wet piles of suck, because all the car chases in the universe have been done and over done. It took Quentin Tarantino putting a stunt driver’s life in actual danger in Death Proof just to get my attention, which says a little too much about my affinity for sadism, but my dominatrix and I refuse to be judged by you “normal” people, so there.
So here’s Fast and Furious, fasterer and furiouser than ever in the fourth movie of the series about men who crash cars and the scantily clad women who love them. Vin Diesel returns and is now literally a diesel fueled 18-wheeler, with biceps as big as most people’s Labradors and a muscle frame that could generously be called gigantic and realistically called Texas. He gets tangled up with Crisco-tanned hunksicle dujour Paul Walker, who since the first two movies has managed to join the FBI in what I can only assume was a hire from the current administration’s desire to put the sex back in Federal Bureau of Insextigation.
See, it’s in there. The joke works, okay?
Anyway, they get involved with guns and drugs somewhere along the way because what else do underground street racers do in their spare time? Y’know, besides prostitutes.
Zing!
Also, how many times does a movie drug baron have to be Hispanic before it’s considered racist? This movie answers that question.
I’m cracking a lot of wises because if you’ve seen any movie in the past decade that involved the driving in or theft of really nice motor vehicles that you’ll never own in your entire life ever, you’ve seen this movie.
Highlights include a lot of unintentionally hilarious moments of dialogue where the writers were trying to catch the previously unfurioused members of the audience up on what happened in the first film. Thus a lot of conversations end up like, “I’m angry at you for betraying me but am still secretly love you.” “I am apologetic for my betraying you and am also still secretly in love with you.”
As for the action, well, let’s say that this is not a movie for people who like cars, this is a movie for people who like car pieces — on fire. This is a movie for anarchists and counterculture types who like to see the upper class’ metallic wieners blown into smithereens’ smithereens. This not so much a gearhead’s paradise as it is an auto insurance salesman’s nightmare, as none of the characters have any special love for their machines.
The actual car chases are decently pulse-pounderific, enough so that me and the rest of the ADD crowd who wage a daily war trying not to run into oncoming traffic to retrieve shiny pennies won’t get distracte — what was I talking about? Ooh look, a plastic bag!
Normally I’m the first to tear movies apart for bad CG, and let me tell you that a lot of these car chases happened on a harddrive and not in a hardtop, but they make it work by keeping the crashes fairly frequent and ensuring the audience never goes ten seconds without a Diesel-trademarked eye narrowing plus grunting combo.
And you ladies out there better be prepared to grow some hair on your chest and make vroom vroom noises, because this is a badass guys only affair. It’s really disappointing that there aren’t any wicked cool fems in this movie, and had I known this would be a sausage fest I’d have spent the six dollar ticket on breakfast at Denny’s.
Perhaps I’ve finally gone mainstream, but you could settle for worse action movies than this. But if you want an action movie recommendation I suggest you go see Taken again. It owns your soul anyway so you might as well get used to it.
So, do you like watching Top Gear, counting your muscles and seeing fiery balls of doom consume illegal street racers? Then this is the only movie for you, you big sick freaks.
