Fast & Furious

Today’s pre­view is Fast & Furi­ous. If this sounds like some sort of  2001 throw­back to you, you’re not alone. After see­ing this trailer in the the­ater and then try­ing to find some infor­ma­tion on it later, I had a dif­fi­cult time dis­cern­ing the dif­fer­ence between this third sequel, “Fast & Furi­ous,” and the first movie, “The Fast and the Furi­ous.” Notice the sub­tle con­trasts? Nei­ther did I. I don’t know about you, but that sounds like the same movie to me. It turns out that isn’t really far from the truth.

Some­how Uni­ver­sal con­vinced the entire orig­i­nal cast to reprise their roles. This is was no small task con­sid­er­ing the only return­ing cast mem­ber to the sec­ond film was Paul Walker. That should give you some sort of hint about the qual­ity of the fran­chise right off the bat. And if that doesn’t do it, how about the fact that nobody from the first or sec­ond films was in the third. The fact that the orig­i­nal cast is back for the fourth means one of sev­eral things:

• The qual­ity of script writ­ing has dras­ti­cally improved.
• Uni­ver­sal found a two story pile of cash hid­den away in an unused screen­ing studio.
• The abyss we now call the U.S. economy is slowly begin­ning to unfurl its oily ten­ta­cles and grope its way towards the actors’ guild.

Per­haps I’m wrong about the qual­ity. The trailer cer­tainly looks action packed. Hell, throw in a few shots of Michelle Rodriguez lean­ing against some killer hot rods and we’ve got our­selves a block­buster hit! At least, that’s how I imag­ine the board meet­ing going. I also image them drink­ing cock­tails with small umbrel­las perched on the side and eat­ing ham & cheese sand­wiches on rye cut into tiny tri­an­gles. They prob­a­bly fol­lowed it up with a round of golf at the club and a game of snooker in the lounge.

But none of that is impor­tant. What is impor­tant is that Vin Diesel is back. This guy hasn’t been in any­thing remotely decent since…hold on…I’m still scrolling down the page…it looks like since the first The Fast and the Furi­ous, if you want to count that as decent. There was the whole Chron­i­cles of Rid­dick thing, which Uni­ver­sal seemed to think was worth drag­ging through the mud for three movies, but I’ve never really been a fan of self inflicted pun­ish­ment, so I only saw the first one. Evi­dently Vin Diesel was in Sav­ing Pri­vate Ryan – which I cer­tainly don’t recall – which either means I need to revisit that film or his part was so small it doesn’t really matter.

In any case, if you’re inter­ested in cars, explo­sions, girls or…Vin Diesel I guess, go check out this film. If you’re not into those things or you’d pre­fer to spend your money in more pro­duc­tive ways, you can prob­a­bly skip it.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 21st, 2009 at 10:03 pm and is filed under News, Previews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.