a review of 速度与激情

#86 (March 27/31): Confession time: I've managed to go the whole past 16 years without seeing a single FatF movie, so I've decided to put aside my earlier snobbishness about the franchise (the popularity of which had totally passed me by until the last couple of entries) and approach it with an open mind, in time for The Fate of the Furious to hit theaters. That's right, I'm going to RUN THE SERIES for the next two weeks and see how it goes. To be perfectly honest, in a lot of ways this first movie is more or less exactly what I'd expected it was when I skipped it back in 2001. Loud, dumb, and full of pointless testosterone, it more or less perfectly melded with the cringable nu-metal and rap-rock music scenes I shunned at that time. Paul Walker (rest his soul) is perhaps the most obvious undercover cop in the history of film, but it's easy to see how this was Vin Diesel's mainstream breakthrough, as he displays some genuine screen charisma here. The film's treatment of illegal street racing is handled with a certain amount of visual style, but it never quite explains how the drag races ever come down to anything other than mashing nitrous buttons and hoping for the best. Not a great movie by any means, but I can see that there's some possible potential here.