Maybe I should preface this with the disclaimer that I’ve not seen any of the previous installments of The Fast and the Furious. I’m not a fan of Vin Diesel. I’m not particularly interested in fast cars and, most of the time, I’m more irritated than outright furious.
I also didn’t know anything about the characters’ backstories going into the film nor was I, in full disclosure, looking forward to this screening. That said, I had a lot of fun with this flick—and evidently so did everyone else at the screening, from the critics, who laughed snarkily at the plot contrivances and flagrantly obvious exposition, to the rest of the audience, who clapped at every conceivable moment and in general ate it up like hotcake-crepes wrapped in unicorn butts.
If you have seen the other movies, you may be happy to know that the original trio of Vin Diesel (Dominic Toretto), Paul Walker (Brian O’Connor), and Jordana Brewster (Mia Toretto, Dominic’s sister and Brian’s lover) are back, as are Sung Kang (Han Lue), Tyrese Gibson (Roman Pearce), Matt Schulze (Vince), Ludacris (Tej Parker), a whole bunch of others I’m not sure were in the other several thousand Fast-and-Furiouses, and, what the hell, they got The Rock, too.
The movie begins with the jail-springing of Toretto, a stunt so implausible that not even the film itself takes it seriously, and soon the gang’s in Rio (and, after seeing the animated film Rio recently, I’m guessing that somewhere there’s an elephantine warehouse filled with stock shots of the cityscape as leered from behind Christ’s shoulder), plotting a car-jack heist for their shady friend Vince, who’s after three seized cars being transported across the country by train.
