a review of 速度与激情2

#89 (March 30/31) After watching the first film in the FatF series earlier this week, I was pretty underwhelmed, which led me to wonder if perhaps I'd been correct all along in my out-of-hand dismissal of the series as dumb trash. But I am here to tell you that the scales have officially dropped from my eyes on this franchise, because -- what do you know? -- the sequel was actually a lot of fun. It's just as ridiculously meatheaded as the first movie, but under John Singleton's direction it achieves a certain self-awareness that made a big difference in my enjoyment. Whereas the first film was a fairly leaden, drama-heavy play on "Point Break", this one keeps it light as a riff on the racially-harmonious buddy-cop genre exemplified by "48 Hours" and "Lethal Weapon". Except for a couple of sequences (like a semi-grotesque torture scene) the whole thing plays out like a big cartoonish '80s action comedy. I wasn't initially sold on a whitebread performer like Walker as the de facto main character of this franchise, but he's starting to grow on me. The entire supporting crew in #2 (particularly Tyrese and Ludacris) are a LOT more fun than the characters from the first film, which worries me because I know that at least some of them don't show up in the later entries. From where I'm sitting right now, I feel like this might be an underrated entry in the series overall, but time will tell.