I Would Like to See It: The Fast and the Furious

The single most devastating thing about this movie is that Rob Cohen has absolutely no idea how to convey a sense of speed. He tries, I’ll give him that much. Shaky-cam, weak CGI, sped-up footage, tight, jittery zooms on eyes narrowing and clutches shifting, green screens — there’s a whole bag of tricks in play from the word “go”, but taken together it serves mostly to make the whole thing feel a sterile and false as the spotless and un-lived in cars our protagonists obsess over. There’s no sense of objects moving through linear space, nor a serviceable cartoon logic in its place. The illegal street races, nominally the heart and soul of the film, are ugly, incoherent messes without a clear sense of space, distance, velocity, or weight. Cohen is inexplicably fond of shooting his characters from the side as they race, making it impossible to see where they’re going and divorcing us from their perspective. Even a simple wide angle from inside the cars might give a rudimentary sense of the horizon, but there’s nothing. Nothing at all.

What The Fast and the Furious DOES have is a really good performance by Vin Diesel as Dominic “Dom” Toretto, a truck hijacker and street racer. Diesel’s warm, textured baritone and subtly expressive features make Dom much more than the collection of cliches he’s written to be, and even manage to dredge a little chemistry out of Paul Walker’s otherwise terminally bland undercover cop Brian Spilner, the Keanu to Dom’s Swayze in the film’s Point Break dynamic. The truck hijacking sequences themselves may be poorly paced and choreographed and rendered somewhat laughable by the Mission: Impossible-style gadgets Dom and company use to do the whole thing at high speed, but at least there’s a little bit of heart behind all the bad production design and weak, gutless action.

Without Diesel in frame, though, Walker is completely lifeless onscreen, his scenes with his police and FBI handlers kept alive solely by the valiant efforts of Ted Levine and Thom Barry, whose every line of shopworn cop talk makes Walker seem like he’s not even in the room. I know it’s bad form to speak ill of the dead, but since Walker was a teenager-dating creep IRL I feel fine saying he just flat-out stinks. He can’t banter, he can’t strut, he can’t do any of the macho car guy stuff around which the film is built. As a final note, it feels strange to call a film like The Fast and the Furious talky, but at no point does Cohen trust us to observe the connection between his characters and their cars, relying instead on avalanches of recited part names that feel amateurish and bland. The only real emotion brought into any such scene is when Dom discusses the car that killed his father, a gorgeous piece of Detroit steel. If he’s carrying the movie, at least he’s got the shoulders for it.