Film review: Fast and Furious (12A)

Published on Sunday 12 April 2009 12:08

Directed by: Justin Lin Starring: Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Jordana Brewster **

ACTION franchises don't come much more chop-shopped than The Fast and the Furious series. Basically Point Break for petrol-heads, each new instalment feels like the cinematic equivalent of a car that has been ripped off, re-sprayed and given a new set of plates every couple of years to get a little more box-office mileage out of it. For this fourth outing, the producers have lured back original stars Vin Diesel (who bailed after one film) and Paul Walker (who clearly thought 2 Fast 2 Furious was 2 much), but really, so what? Their careers were on the slide anyway and, despite a nifty opening that initially backs up the streamlined title, Fast and Furious provides ample evidence why. As the film expands on a story its one-note characters and perfunctory script can't support, their lack of charisma becomes ever more apparent, with Diesel flashing his muscles and delivering his lines like a bear forced to do circus tricks, and Walker doing his enigma-free Keanu Reeves thing. The rusty plot has Diesel's street-racing larcenist team up with Walker's rule-breaking FBI guy to bring down an evil drug baron, but it's just filler between lots of jerkily edited car porn.