When it comes to street racing and its effects on cars, one can lose more things than just good gas mileage. Beyond any sort of insurance coverage, there's the loss of rubber on the tires and wear on the brakes. If reckless or untalented enough, there's also the possibility of losing paint, sideview mirrors, wheel covers, bumpers and even side quarter panels. But I've never heard of anyone losing the lettering that advertises make and model type.
Yet that's apparently what's happened to the fourth vehicle in the movie series that started with "The Fast and the Furious" back in 2001. While most sequel titles get more creative -- such as 2003's "2 Fast 2 Furious" -- or longer -- referring to "The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift" from 2006 -- than their original predecessor, the one for this latest offering apparently lost some letters as it's simply "Fast & Furious."
Some would argue that the truncated title simply suggests the film has been stripped down to the essentials that made the original pic so enticing for its target audience. Namely that means the reunion of its original stars, Vin Diesel and Paul Walker, along with their characters' leading ladies played by Michelle Rodriguez and Jordana Brewster. In fact, the film's tag line gets it just right: "New Model. Original Parts."
Unfortunately, that also means it's more of the same old, same old, despite Brian O'Conner (Walker) replying to Dominic Toretto's (Diesel) question, "You sure you want to do this? with the reply, "A lot has changed." Well, it hasn't, as the decent to over-edited and over-directed car race & chase sequences are surrounded by increasingly boring drama and melodrama.
That said, if you're a member of the intended audience you probably won't mind, as there's the usual bevy of hot girls (scantly attired, doing sexy dancing when not making out with each other for nothing more than pure exploitative titillation), equally "sexy" cars (with the camera lecherously lingering on them as much as the flesh and blood bods), and lots of face racing, chasing, fisticuffs, shoot-outs and more.
The film does start off decently, with a gas heist involving an insanely long tanker, resourceful thieves in muscle cars, a fairly severe downward sloping highway, and a nasty hairpin curve off in the distance. While it's not quite up there with something similar in "The Road Warrior" and starts to go too far into preposterousness, it's a decently staged sequence from director Justin Lin who also helmed the slide/drift happy third installment of the series.
After that, the film bogs down in Walker and Diesel's characters simultaneously but separately infiltrating a drug operation where the number two man there (John Ortiz) has them and others try out to be drivers for the smuggling operation (their test involves a street race through city traffic in an okay, but over-cut sequence). They do so for different reasons (Brian for work, Dom for revenge), and the two actors play off each other in a macho-tinged antagonistic but bordering on friendship sort of way, yet without any sense of the goofiness of it all.
The biggest problem is that the rest of the moments in Chris Morgan's screenplay don't have the same level of mindlessly diversionary get up and go as the racing and chasing ones. Yet, even they become redundant, as the film possesses not one but two race through a border tunnel sequences. The fact that they and other similar moments don't live up to the opening sequence means everything that follows that is a letdown.
With some additional (not to mention smartly written) humor, the film probably would have been more fun to watch. As it stands, it's not much different from the predecessors and essentially just serves (as the common movement in filmmaking nowadays) as a rebooting, if you will, of the original film that will allow for yet another round of sequels.
While it passes the litmus test of making one (if young, male and/or possessing some degree of interest in fast cars) want to blast down the road after seeing it, the unnecessary, dramatic and melodramatic baggage inside keeps this offering from racing across the finish line with flying colors. Having jettisoned its use of "the," "Fast & Furious" rates as a 3 out of 10.
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