Review of 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003) by Mitchell B — 17 Sep 2014

Note that this is m first experience with the Fast and Furious franchise.

With my not-so positive thoughts on the original Fast and Furious film, and hearing that the franchise only gets worse before it gets better, my expectations for it's first sequel was some of the lowest expectations I've had in any blockbuster, especially when the film title is one of the worst sequel titles I've heard of (Really? 2 Fast 2 Furious? That's almost as dumb as Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakuel). Bu even with these low expectations, 2 Fast 2 Furious brings the franchise down to a lever of absolute boredom and absurdity that makes me question whether it's worth watching this franchise to begin with.

As for the plot, I'm not going to bother with a small recap; the film's so dumb it hardly makes any sense. Somehow it involves Paul Walker's character teaming up with an old friend to destroy a drug cartel. A plotline this simple shouldn't be so complicated, but that's what 2 Fast 2 Furious does. I think director John Singleton was confused that this was some intelligent man's drama instead of an entertaining blockbuster, and the results fail horribly. I don't know if it's just me, or is that these double-crossing scenes should just stick to the films of Jason Bourne or James Bond.

One of the things that I liked in the first film is the incredible stuntwork. Here, the film fails to impress. There's a little more streetracing this time around, but this time, every race and any form of action just plain bores. There's even some shots where CGI's involved, and even the CG is bad, particularly in an extremely ridiculous scene towards the end involving a yacht.

Don't get me wrong; I actually think Paul Walker is trying his absolute best in his role (he was one of the best things in the first), but his character is just way too bland to care. There's some scenes where you'd wish that Vin Diesel was involved in this (Walker was the only one in the original film to return here), and the whole cast in that matter. Even though I never cared for the characters in the first, I'd rather watch them then the new characters presented in this film. Having Ludacris in a motion picture is just downright unbearable, Eva Mendes is a pointless love interest, and Cole Hauser is an extremely dull villain. Even more frustrating is that instead of Vin Diesel in the buddy role, we have Tyrese Gibson (yep, that underused guy from Transformers who always hung out with Josh Duhamel), and he's just flat-out irritating. It's not even called acting what Gibson does, just all 100% screaming that gets old in the first ten seconds of screen-time. His "YO HOMIE" slang makes Shia LaBoeuf's girl-screaming in Transformers 2 sound hilarious.

But with all this hate, there's two things about 2 Fast 2 Furious that I thought was an improvement from the first. First is that the horrendous sexism problem is nowhere as irritating, though there's still some occasional hooker women in the opening racing scene (I promise to all women reading this that the sexism almost ends after the first race). The other is that the score improves as well. Though there's still those annoying rap songs that play out in some scenes, the actual score from David Arnold actually manages to gain a decent amount of impression. It makes the film sound kind of cool for once.

However, a score's a score, and a good music score doesn't bring my rating up to such a bad movie. Aside from the completely awful title (wouldn't it have been easier if they called this Fast & Furious 2?), 2 Fast 2 Furious is 2 Irritating 2 Dumb to be taken seriously in a so-called "entertaining" blockbuster, with almost atrocious acting, a plot that is unbearable to watch, unnecessary CGI stunts, dull action sequences, and the questionable disappearance of the original cast with the exception of Paul Walker brings the franchise down to an extremely low level. Either I'll continue to hate future installments of this franchise or I'll get into them once I get to the 5th one. Oh well, at least the sexism wasn't as bad this time around,.

"You know, I like you. But I still gotta kill you. It's my job.".