Column:

'Fast & Furious' stalls at the gate

A ridiculous climax can't quite make up for the first 90 minutes.

By Adam Daniels

Published April 6, 2009

When you hand the usher your ticket to "Fast & Furious," you're obviously checking your expectations for a few amenities at the door: refined dialogue, character development, plot intricacies.

This is the quintessential cinematic example of a film that exemplifies the phrase, "It is what it is." That seems like a pretty fair exchange for the hour and a half of pure machismo the original offered eight years ago. But there is one thing missing from "Fast & Furious" no one could have foreseen: adrenaline.

Where this feature got lost along the way seems a bit unclear. The trailer surged with so much adrenaline it caused a whole nation of moviegoers to be nostalgic for something almost none of them had realized they'd missed in the past seven years. And the Apatow-driven takeover of the guy movie landscape that trades fast cars for fast wit even gave this remodel the bizarre distinction of feeling like a breath of fresh air.

But then the first hour and a half of this hour-and-40-minute film happened. And if, as this franchise leads us to believe, cars represent sex and high-stake chases are supposed to arouse us, the first 95 percent of this film sort of feels like someone handing you a swimsuit issue that opens up to have photos essays on your grandmother's bridge club.

The unnecessarily complicated plot of "Fast & Furious" is based on the retribution Toretto (Vin Diesel) seeks for the murder of Letty (Michelle Rodriguez), his love from the first film.

But this is where it gets complicated. It turns out Letty was murdered through her association with a ubiquitous drug cartel. That in turn reunites Diesel with his former undercover pal Brian O'Connor (Paul Walker).

During this build-up, the lack of any memorable edge-of-your-seat action aside from one car race and one anticlimactic sting forces the viewer to endure the ridiculously corny dialogue and Cop Banter For Dummies subplots.

There is even one surreal 10-minute section near the middle of the film where Walker and Diesel are reunited in what can't help but feel like a buddy comedy. The hilarity of that potential makes the fistfight that ends the short-living honeymoon feel like the disturbance that always makes us wonder what might have been.

Finally, after a film that felt more like police-sketch comedy parodies sponsored by Honda than an action blockbuster, the build-up went somewhere in the last 10 minutes. And this scene was everything someone paying for this film could possibility hope for.

The film throws reality to the wayside in exchange for a final scene in which men are killed by almost every combination of cars, guns, wide-open desert, underground tunnels, wheelies and Vin Diesel's forearm as you can imagine. The climax is so ridiculously awesome that it almost atones for the sins of the previous 90 minutes. But the ultimate question remains: after looking at 95 pages of the bridge club in winter coats, do the 14 half-naked swimsuit models holding up signs with their phone numbers on the last page even matter anymore?