When Vin Diesel left after the original and the sequel outgrossed it, you couldn't blame the producers of The Fast and the Furious franchise for figuring they could cast hunks of wood as long as they smashed up high-performance cars.
But Tokyo Drift, the third in the series, pulled in Woody Allen box-office numbers.
So clearly, not all hunks of wood are created equal.
Fast & Furious -- a movie so fast and furious they no longer even have time for definite articles -- connects the dots to the original with extreme prejudice, reuniting Diesel and Paul Walker as street-racing bad-boys on opposite sides of the law.
It also brings back original leading ladies Michelle Rodriguez and Jordana Brewster as Diesel's and Walker's girlfriends respectively.
This will probably make a big difference at the box office.
Why, I don't know. By now it's no great revelation that neither can make the acting jump from A to B. But Diesel and Walker do seem to have some kind of bromance chemistry.
More importantly, this time their characters are on the same side of the law (more or less), and the motive is ... REVENGE!
Yes, this time it's personal (as a Lost fan, I don't know who Michelle Rodriguez ticked off that her characters keep getting killed off). But when the fugitive carjacker Dominic Toretto (Diesel) loses his lady love in the first act at the hands of a Mexican heroin dealer's gang, both he and rogue cop Brian O'Connor (Walker) enroll in an L.A. street race -- the winner of which gets a lucrative job as a drug mule for the mysterious druglord Braga.
Now, I understand why this would be an effective way to suss driving talent. But the race -- which causes millions of dollars of damage and leaves losing participants to be picked up by cops -- seems like a rather attention-getting gambit for a druglord trying to stay under the radar.
Okay, I promise this is the last time I'm going to think about the plot of Fast & Furious. I'm not going to even get into a thuddingly stupid plothole involving Braga's fingerprint. I will mention that, though I love the car chases, the Fast and Furious movies are remarkably humourless for action films. I never thought I'd miss Arnold and his dumb puns.
Okay, so let's get to the important stuff. There are three great chase scenes in Fast & Furious -- a bargain compared to what you'd pay to attend a demolition derby.
The movie opens with an oil-truckjacking on a perilous Latin American mountain road, with Dom and his pals pulling off all kinds of spins and vehicle-to-vehicle acrobatics.
The L.A. street race is also pretty cool -- the first chase scene I can remember with colour commentary by the GPS robot-lady.
The claustrophobic finale, though, takes place in a secret tunnel-road under the U.S./Mexican border (which explains a lot, illegal alien-wise).
Tokyo Drift director Justin Lin films this one with the most flair and no small amount of destruction.
Casualties of road-war include Dom's 1970 Chevelle SS and his 1970 Charger R/T, Brian's Subaru Impreza WRX and his R34 Skyline GT-R, plus any number of nitro-charged Nissans, BMWs and Toyotas.
If nothing else, three or four more Fast & Furiouses could float the car industry through the recession.
(This film is rated 14-A)
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