Fast Month - 2 Fast 2 Furious

Well, the first movie was a hit, so a sequel was inevitable, and because they love puns, 2 Fast 2 Furious, this is Fast Month

There is technically a short film between the events of the first and second movies. It’s entirely skippable so we’ll be skipping over it. 2 Fast 2 Furious was released in 2003, and is the only movie in the Franchise not to star Vin Diesel, he was busy working on xXx, which sounds like a low-rent porno. I’ve never actually seen xXx. Also, the Chronicals of Riddick, which lost money at the box office so… great choice there.

The budget was increased, this time at around $76m, the box office was also increased, but only to $236m, far from the juggernaut it would become later on. The sequel was not critically acclaimed with a 37% rating on Rotten Tomatoes with an average 4.7/10 and 5.9 on IMDb, with 2 razzie nominations for worst remake/sequel and worst excuse for a movie (all concept/no content). But here are my thoughts.

Brian Walker has tried to settle down in Miami but after winning a street race, he ends up arrested. His only way out is to go undercover, but since no-one at the FBI is competent enough to partner with him (yes, seriously) he needs the help of frenemy Roman Pierce (Tyrese Gibson). Together they must stop someone named Carter Verone, by doing, what else? A f*ck ton of driving.

This was the first of the F+F movies to begin diverging away from the street race angle, to the point where they ditch it pretty much altogether later on. This movie may feature lots of driving, but only 2 actual street races. The first of which is just about setting up some characters and isn’t really relevant to the plot. The second introduces some throwaway characters just to lose the race and we’ll never see them again. It’s more plot relevant but it’s brief and not exactly exciting seeing as we know they ain’t losing. I don’t really care that they ditched street racing but it was the niche audience they were initially and this could’ve dramatically backfired.

Instead, the lean more on chase sequences, they did exist in the first, mostly the truck heists, but there are a few more of them in this one. One including what I presume is a dimensionally transcendental garage spewing out hundreds of cars to distract the police. Speaking of police, we have another ass hole cop. He’s an idiot who didn’t think that a job that involved driving fast cars would involve driving cars quickly. He’s the embodiment of this clip

This movie is full of very stupid moments like that. Like the fact so many convertibles are used. I’m not an expert but aren’t convertibles generally slower and less rigid and their hardtop counterparts, what use are they in street racing or as getaway vehicles. Roman setting the car of 2 employees on fire because why not?

I suppose I should also mention Tej Parker (Ludacris) since he comes up later… There, I’ve mentioned him, let’s move on.

There’s a lot of innuendos in this movie, and that sexism is beginning to become a bit more apparent, we do have a decent female character in Monica Fuentes (Eva Mendes) but she’s not that major a character and honestly her only subplot is whether or not Brian is flirting with her. Unfortunately, he has more chemistry with Roman, the homo-erotic subtexts of their interactions is almost comical as they:

Stare deeply into each other’s eyes, wrestle, make suggestive comments about each other and show off to each other. Also, wasn’t Brian a cr*ppy street racer in the last movie?

Yeah, Roman presents a bit of a retcon to the events in the last movie, for the better I think since it does shed a bit more light on why Brian did what he did? Why the police are so obsessed with him is puzzling but what can you do?

Other than that though, this movie is kinda dull, the car chases go on too long, the villain is boring, and the bits between the races are also kinda dull. Also, I think Paul Walker’s acting suffers from not having Vin Diesel around.

Rating 55/100

In the next movie we’ll see how its done in Japan with Tokyo drift.