| THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS Release Date: 14/09/2001 Certificate: 15 Official Website Director: Rob Cohen Producer: Neal H. Moritz Screenplay: David Ayer, Erik Bergquist & Gary Scott Thompson |
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| Pitch Black's Vin Diesel heads a cast of virtual unknowns in this highly-charged movie set around the illegal street racing scene in LA. It doesn't really matter though, as the starts of the film are most definitely the cars. Paul Walker plays O'Connor. Sent undercover to investigate the audacious hijackings of trucks full of DVD players, he falls in with a team of racers led by Dominic (Diesel). Under pressure from his superiors to crack the case, Brian comes to respect the charismatic Dom, and falls in love |
| with his babelicious sister (Jordana Brewster). Walker, along with most of the cast, is pretty lightweight. The only person to really stand out is Vin Diesel, turning another great performance as a super-tough, deep-voiced anti-hero.He's got the screen presence and look to have a great career in action movies ahead of him. |
| The characters quickly become secondary to the vehicles they build and drive, though. Probably the best sequence is the first race. Four cars thunder down a street in LA, burning nitrous oxide to rocket along at incredible speed. These are the parts where the direction is at its most kinetic and inventive too. The camera shakes violently as the cars scream past, or we go through the windscreen, treated to every dip of the clutch as the gears are satisfyingly rammed home. We follow the path through a car's inner workings as the nitrous oxide ignites, or a part cannot take the power and explodes. There are also some beautiful A-Team-esque moments of cars flying through the air and rolling an |
| improbable number of times, kicking up dust in their wake. By having one of the most visceral chases so early on, though, Cohen builds a level of expectation that is not quite lived up to in the rest of the movie. There is quite a large chase/race-free segment in the middle, and too much emphasis than the actor should really be trusted with is placed on Brian's divided loyalties. Which is much less interesting than the cool final race between him and Dom. Nevertheless, The Fast and The Furious is a superb summer action movie. See it on the big screen, just take it easy driving home. 6/10. |
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