By
Graig Uhlin
Arizona Summer Wildcat
Stylish but ultimately empty 'Fast and the Furious' running on fumes
Grade: C-
See car. Car is pretty. See pretty car go. Pretty car go fast - really fast. Roll credits.
And that, dear readers, is all there is to "The Fast and the Furious."
In the film industry's second assault in as many weeks on the Velcro wallets of 14-year-old boys everywhere - the first being the video-game-meets-Angelina-Jolie wet dream of "Tomb Raider" - Universal unveils a movie with hot girls and hotter cars that is guaranteed to get any adolescent's motor running. Welcome to the summer movie season.
Seemingly in summer Hollywood films, style and substance are mutually exclusive qualities. "Pearl Harbor," for instance, may have made historians cry out in anguish, but at least it was nice to look at. Hell, at least it made an attempt at substance. Only occasionally are there exceptions - think "The Sixth Sense" or this year's "Shrek" and Spielberg's upcoming "A.I." - and it is these films that are the box office winners.
"The Fast and the Furious" is not one of these exceptions. It is nothing if not an example of style over substance - if only the style was something audiences had not already seen before.
The film centers around Brian O'Conner (Paul Walker), an undercover cop who infiltrates the street racing underworld in order to catch a handful of thieves. To do so, he must earn the respect of racing demi-god Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel). Brian succeeds, predictably, as he, in the process, destroys the insides of his car in an adrenaline-pumping street race, eliciting a fist-pounding "awesome" from the teenage boys in the audience. Once he enters this world, though, Brian is forced to choose between allegiances - does he betray his new friends who welcomed him so that he can save his career or will the bonds of machismo prove stronger than ambition?
The audience doesn't much care, and neither, it seems, does the film. Always style over substance! This guiding principle forces the film to sacrifice narrative clarity for cheap set-ups where the characters' cars receive the most considerate on-screen treatment. What a weird thing it was to see a film treats its actors more like props than the cars those actors are driving. And when Brian does finally choose between allegiances, the decision is an emotionally empty, logically incomprehensible one that just signals for the audience that it has seen all the car races and gratuitous T & A shots it's going to see this afternoon.
This film, by the way, could have been much better had it simply dropped the tired undercover-cop plot device and focused on the outsider status of Brian trying to earn a place in a world that at first doesn't want any part of him. But whatever, the plot was obviously an afterthought.
The style, however, was paid considerable attention. Director Rob Cohen achieves a frenetic pace when filming the racing scenes - shooting in fast motion, capturing the race from extraordinary camera angles and setting it all against a testosterone-packed soundtrack of angry white male rock and hip-hop. It's all very riveting and exciting but once the film slows down for the plot, one just gets, well, bored. The fast-paced style of "The Fast and the Furious" does a stellar job of making the audience feel as if it were in the driver's seat but it just a shame that there's nothing under the hood.
