Hot rods, hot bods and little else.
Directed by John Singleton, a onetime wannabe-auteur who seems to have embraced his inner hack, 2 Fast 2 Furious is the latest in a fairly new subgenre: the bling-bling action flick. Like other examples of the breed?including the original The Fast and the Furious, Romeo Must Die, Exit Wounds and last summer's XXX?this one effortlessly fuses 1990s Hollywood action noise with hip-hop materialism, five-minutes-ago slang, ghetto-fabulous fashion and gangsta-rap machismo fantasies. (Nobody holds their pistols sideways, but there are plenty of sullen stare-downs.) The film's visceral aggressiveness?the bowel-liquefying rumble of souped-up hot-rod engines; the jump-to-hyperspace digital blur whenever a street racer switches on his turbo booster; the pervasive, casual brutality, epitomized in a scene in which a Customs agent is tortured with a blowtorch, a trashcan and a rat?are of a piece with the jocular selfishness of the movie's salt-and-pepper leads. This Furious is even dumber and more ruthless than the first?a bigger, louder, glitzier, four-wheeled modern equivalent of those hippie-pandering American International Pictures flicks from the 60s about hairy bikers sticking it to The Man.
The movie has more of a situation than a plot, and deswpite its periodic pedal-to-the-metal car chases, it unfolds at a leisurely pace, like a slowed-down episode of Fox's canceled, oddly similar series Fastlane, or a guided tour of a noveau riche rapper's estate in the Hamptons. Recruited to bust a Miami-area drug dealer, cop-turned-outlaw Brian O'Connor (Paul Walker) and his childhood pal, career criminal Roman Pearce (Tyrese) are really just a couple of good-time guys who've been given the chance to live the life of movie stars or rappers?hot cars, opulent homes and apartments, lavish parties stocked with bootylicious babes. Their bosses in U.S. Customs have sworn to purge their criminal records if they cooperate?a supreme bit of wish-fulfillment in this three-strikes-and-you're-out era?but that's as deep as the movie's redemption theme goes, and perhaps it's for the best.
As played by the blank-faced Walker?easily the blandest new action hero of recent times?O'Connor seems more excited by the cars and their accessories than by the film's many chases, beatdowns, shootouts and gratuitous oglings of the female posterior. Singleton and his cinematographer, Matthew F. Leonetti, keep the lens at butt-level whenever shapely ladies are about, as if testing out a new kind of gyroscopically stablized camera mount: BubbleCam. Indeed, the film's real stars aren't the brightly-painted, product-placed Mitsubishis?rightly mocked by the bad guys as looking like something that came out of a cereal box?but the women who orbit around those cars and occasionally slip into the driver's seat for a fifth-banana test drive.
It's hard to say which is more up to date, the hubcaps, rocket boosters and on-board computer systems on the hot-rods, or the staggering array of facelifts, tummy tucks, plastic boobies and airlifted heinies on the women. Singleton, who still can't resist keepin' it real, lets you know he's an ass man, encoding his near-religious posterior worship in every level of the movie, from imagery to dialogue. Barreling down a stretch of Miami blacktop in the film's opening drag race, Asian-American hot-rodder Suki (Devon Aoki) yells, "Smack that ass!" Later, bad guy Carter Verone (Cole Hauser, passing for Latino with dyed-black hair and weirdly sculpted eyebrows) asserts dominance over his lover and right-hand woman, an undercover customs agent named Monica Fuentes (Eva Mendes), by slapping her patootie. This is that rare summer blockbuster in which the cast's female performers could legitimately ask why the director is always up their butt.
Ditto the men, come to think of it: Singleton doesn't camera-pinch the booties of Walker and Tyrese, but he sells their Butch-and-Sundance competitiveness so hard that the movie becomes a coded gay love story. (At one point, Roman doffs his shirt and wraps it around his fist to smash open the window of a car containing some contraband: Exasperated, Brian simply opens the door, which was unlocked the whole time, then snarls, "Now put your blouse back on.")
If you're 15?or if you're 15 at heart?you'll love this movie. It's pure adolescent fantasy, minus the complications that good adolescent fantasies should have. At least Luke Skywalker was tempted by evil in Star Wars and became more isolated from his loved ones the more powerful he became. In comparison, Brian is so passive and low-key?perhaps as a result of Walker's nearly charisma-free, Kevin Costner-Lite performance?and the situations he's in demand such minor emotional sacrifices that he often seems to be a bystander in his own story.
I was grateful for the presence of Tyrese, an equally unimaginative actor who at least knows how to pimp a cartoonish bad-boy image. He's good at three things?pouty hostility, naked self-pity and schoolyard swagger: Put him in a situation that calls for nuance, and you're in big trouble. He does have a touch of the movie star about him. Tyrese had an electrifying anti-charm in Singleton's hypocritical, fitfully brilliant social drama Baby Boy?a supposed sociopolitical drama that embraced the same ghetto-macho nonsense it pretended to criticize?and he has some amusing stick-it-to-the-man moments in this picture. Nevertheless, like the AWOL costar of the first Furious, Vin Diesel?a junior blaxploitation poseur with an affected, Colt .45 commercial voice?Tyrese is there to confer street cred on the pasty blond hero, who couldn't act down with nonwhite folks even if he wanted to, and thankfully doesn't try. (Rapper Ludacris, another charismatic non-actor, organizes the film's street races and acts as money handler for the gambling hot-rodders.)
2 Fast is interesting mainly as proof of how Hollywood has completely absorbed dead-end underclass fantasies. Like other bling-bling action flicks, it flatters its young, ethnic polyglot audience without challenging it, and it never has anything on its mind besides money and all the liquor, shiny cars and hot sex that money can buy. Despite their desperate circumstances and many feats of physical courage, Brian and Roman definitely aren't heroes in the traditional movie sense, and calling them protagonists is a bit of a stretch, too. They're more acted upon than acting, and they don't seem to have much on their minds besides pure appetite, as epitomized by the film's funniest running gag: Roman's insatiable appetite for junk food.
The script's influences are the influences of its target audience: Star Wars, videogames, MTV. Unimaginative, crude and repetitious as it is, the movie's low cunning is nearly brilliant. It's custom-designed to pander to modern youth's multiracial consciousness, its ingrained distrust of institutions and corporations, its overall aura of "Fuck you, I just wanna get paid" cynicism. It's 21st-century trash.