Fast & Furious

Poster from Fast & Furious

Fast & Furious

Low on gas, the Fast and Furious franchise begins to remake itself

The Fast and the Furious has been a strange ride so far. It started with a Roger Corman movie in the 1950s about a driver on the lam escaping to Mexico under cover of a car race. Then almost a half century later the title rights are secured, but instead of a remake, 2001's The Fast and the Furious remakes surfer / heist film Point Break with custom cars with budding star Vin Diesel, and a new franchise is born.

But when it came time for the first sequel, Diesel drops out, the location is moved from SoCal to Miami, and it somehow morphs from a heist film to a car-guys-take-on-international-drug-kingpin story. This was a mistake since Bad Boys already did it better, and Paul Walker and Tyrese Gibson are no substitute for Will Smith and Martin Lawrence even if they do have cooler cars.

Having ripped-off Point Break and Bad Boys for the first two films, the series then attempts to recreate the magic of The Karate Kid in the third film, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, with some modicum of success.

So what's next? Reboot the franchise! Now just called Fast & Furious the series returns to L.A. in a remake of 2 Fast 2 Furious, another car-guys-take-on-international-drug-kingpin-story. Except what film will the fourth in the series pick to rip off? Bad Boys II, of course! For those unfamiliar with the plot of Bad Boys II, briefly, it takes place several years after the previous film and the two guys attempt to take down a cartel but, after a botched drug raid, (and of course a firefight and car chase) the pair take the battle to the kingpin himself south of the border (in this case Cuba). Complicating things is tension between the two men because one is dating the other's sister. It's also revealed one of them secretly knew the other's girlfriend was in danger, secretly working undercover for the DEA. This is pretty much the exact plot of Fast & Furious, substituting L.A. and Mexico for Miami and Cuba.

Widely regarded one of the weakest in the series, Fast & Furious seems to lack the spark of the original, or even Tokyo Drift. Certainly the idea of taking a film ostensibly about street racing, and removing most of the street racing (the most notable car chase here is through some tunnels in the desert) probably wasn't the wisest decision. Furthermore, it's strangely missing most of the eye and ear candy which give the series it's charm: there's hardly any bikini babes, a boring soundtrack by the likes of Pitbull and Robin Thicke, and honestly not that many cool cars, with a fair number of generic pickups and whatnot driven by cartel thugs.

**1/2 out of *****