2 Fast 2 Furious
Directed by John Singleton

The smartly made 2 Fast 2 Furious may be silly, but it is an enjoyable movie with enough automobile action to keep a viewer strapped in for the length of its ride. Directed by John Singleton, the film is efficient in its execution and always focused on what will please the viewer the most-the look of the cars, the action, the hunky stars and the enviable lifestyle of the bad guy. Plot falls somewhere near the bottom of the list, but there is enough of a conflict to keep all the other components in tune. Paying lip service to the previous Fast and the Furious film, isn't-he-lucky Paul Walker reprises his role, sort of, portraying a now disgraced former Los Angeles cop whose driving skills have improved considerably. Living in Bad Boys II country in Miami, and driving on their roads, he is forcibly recruited back into law enforcement, going undercover with an equally rebellious partner as drivers for a drug kingpin. Does it matter? What you really want to do is turn the sound on the Universal Widescreen release (22975, $27) way up (we hope you aren't watching it in your car), and let 'er rip.

The letterboxing has an aspect ratio of about 2.35:1 and an accommodation for enhanced 16:9 playback. The picture transfer is slick and glossy. The 5.1-channel Dolby Digital sound has some nice sub woofer action and plenty of numbingly loud noises. The details lack the sheer crispness of the best audio transfers, but the sound is sufficiently charged to get its primary tasks accomplished. The 105-minute program has alternate French and Spanish tracks in 5.1 Dolby, optional English, French and Spanish subtitles, and a trivia subtitling option ("James Remar is the only cast member who is left handed.").

The supplements include some heavy plugs for Mitsubishi cars, but that's part of the game. There is a 9-minute profile of Walker and the car he drives, and a 7-minute profile co-star Tyrese Gibson and the car he drives. The DVD menu plays with a videogame format, where you choose a 'character' to represent you, and as a result, the same attention given to Walker and Gibson is also given to a minor supporting actress, Devon Roki, in another 7-minute segment. It's cool, though. Roki has a unique look and it's worthwhile learning more about her. Although she portrays a hotshot driver, she'd actually never learned to drive and had to take a crash course, so to speak, to work on the film. There is an enjoyable 6-minute prolog that shows how Walker's character got from L.A. to Miami, a 10-minute production featurette, 6 minutes of mostly irrelevant deleted scenes, 3 minutes of outtakes that eventually had us giggling along with the cast (something that doesn't happen often), a 3-minute piece on the film's cars, a 5-minute segment on the climactic car-flies-onto-boat stunt, a good 5-minute segment on making some of the music for the film, and a cast & crew profile section.

Singleton supplies a commentary track, explaining that he intended the film to be more evocative of videogames like GTO and cartoons such as Speed Racer than of any motion pictures. He has always tended to be a little over-analytically movie schoolish in his approach to directing, but it seems to work for him and, so far as commentaries go, it enables him to explain where he is coming from and why he is making certain choices. "So basically, each leg of the race would have a theme. Like this first part of the race was about acceleration. We would go, we'd be tight on their eyes and we see them trying to get up to speed, tight, so that when you go wide, when you're tight on their eyes, you go wide, it makes everything else seem more powerful-like here, vroom! You know, and it's the juxtaposition, it's like Sergio Leone did that really well where he would juxtapose close shots with like wide shots, and then, you know, it's kind of a jolting thing, it creates a jolting gestalt in the viewer."

Nevertheless, Singleton clearly has his head on straight when it comes to what 2 Fast 2 Furious was intended to achieve. "The big thing about this movie that I really love, and why I really wanted to do the film, was that it's just a fun movie. There's nothing pretentious about it, there's nothing particularly deep about it. It is just really a fun, what we call a 'popcorn movie,' a great Saturday night movie to go see. There's a little bit in there for everybody."

The Review Vault
The Best of 2003

- by Douglas Pratt

 

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