the fast and the furious

What a terrible film.

It's weird.  I mentioned it in my review at the time, but I actually watched the fourth film in this franchise first and I thought that was much better than this.

I mean, I don't actually think the fourth one was a good film but it was sufficiently glossy and bombastic to be watchable.  This first film has a near identical plot (yes, it came first) but it somehow manages to be dull.

Perhaps there's some budgetary thing going on - the first was risky so there was a smaller budget, maybe?  After it was a success the sequels got more cash?  I dunno, it seems possible but generally sequels are done on smaller budgets.  I can't really be arsed to find out though, and you never really know with these budget numbers they give what and where that money was spent.

But my real issue was that the film just seemed like a bit of a mess.

While both films seemed like heavily planned action sequences strung together by not-very-much of any real interest, in this first one the problem seems to be that they don't really give a crap about the linking parts.  There seemed to be a lot of non-sequitors and bits that didn't actually make much sense, just in order to get to the next cool sequence.

But this is also a reflection of the cool sequences not really meshing together.  It shouldn't be necessary for the connecting bits to work quite as hard at joining the dots as the dots should really join themselves.

One of the particular bits that don't quite work is the supposed rival gang of Asians.  The real reason this doesn't work is that you end up with confused characters and motives.  I mean, the basic problem is that you effectively have two sets of bad guys and the hero is trying to infiltrate one.

The trouble is the team he's infiltrating we're also supposed to think "oh, they're not so bad - it's not like they kill anyone".  I mean, they're criminals, but it's the classic Hollywood bad-good people.  But because they have a properly bad set of guys you end up with this weird situation that he's trying to take down the good-bad guys and not the bad-bad guys.

It's all very weird and convoluted when it didn't have to be.