Here comes the fourth installment of the Fast & Furious franchise and the actors – Vin Diesel, Paul Walker and Michelle Rodriguez – that started this huge piece of crap have returned to continue with that tradition. Brian O’Conner [Paul Walker] is back with the FBI after all the shenanigans he pulled in years preceding this tale and Dominic ‘Dom’ Torreto [Vin Diesel] has returned to town in search of Braga, the newest big time drug smuggler in town. Conner and Dom eventually team up to get Braga and end the drug trafficking between Mexico and the states.

Since we’re seeing characters like Han [Sung Kang] back in the fold we instantly know that this film is not a sequel to my favourite of the franchise – The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift [2006] – since *SPOILER FOR TOKYO DRIFT* Han dies in that installment *END SPOILER*. Now I’ve never made a secret that I’m not a fan of Vin Diesel. The only film I ever liked him in was Saving Private Ryan and that might have had to do with the fact that he dies quickly in that movie so I don’t have to put up with his complete lack of talent for very long and he wasn’t the centre-piece of the film.

While watching this movie and seeing all the faults of the movie I asked myself, “Is this fair for me to be judging the movie harshly?” I realized from the trailer exactly what this movie would be and you know what, I got that. I was shown near two hours of nothing but horrible acting, cliché plot, hot ladies dancing in clubs and street racing like Need For Speed wished it. So this is me saying that I won’t be applying my logic meter to some of the crazy scenes in the movie.

This movie however still fails to one up Tokyo Drift I believe. Tokyo Drift knew exactly what it was and decided that instead of trying to have great mobster film it knew to just get to the fun driving scenes with some stylish filming that made you want to go outside and wreck your lame 10 year old Honda attempting to drift it at 3AM on empty streets. However this new Fast & Furious goes back to the dry street racing where it’s all about muscle, which I never really enjoyed.

Some may be reading this and saying that “I just don’t get it” and I agree, I don’t get it and am proud that I don’t. I sat in the theatre where I heard nothing but cheers. I am not a car person, so the fact that there is some muscle car or Japanese import on screen doesn’t do it for me. I do like a nice looking car now and again, but as the saying goes “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” and I’m a fan of the simple stripped down style over the outlandish paint-jobs that you’ll see on some of these cars. So after not being interested in the cars I watched some of the races and reminded myself why I enjoyed Speed Racer so much last year, because it made the races fun to watch and more of an experience and not into a serious sequence where Newton and his laws were taken into account.

Before I leave you I wanted to make one comment about the film and my theatre’s handling of it. If you read my site a lot you may have read my recent rant about how they handled Watchmen and the editing of the opening sequence in that film. In Fast & Furious I noticed a lot of girl on girl kissing going on throughout the film. I mean all you had to do was walk around some of these clubs and you’ll see a shot of three girls making-out on screen. Now the only difference between this and the Watchmen incident is that the film didn’t take the time to clarify whether these ladies we’re lesbian, bi-sexual or just plain drunk and being freaky, so I’m sure that’s the excuse I’ll get from anyone in the theatre if I ask them but it’s just so dumb for them to do one thing in one scenario and then the complete opposite in another scenario. What did you think of the entire lady on lady action in the movie? We’re you offended or just plain annoyed at why they bothered to edit the Watchmen movie for it?

So overall the movie is all you expect it to be, so if you loved the first The Fast and the Furious movie then go right ahead. But don’t expect me to say this movie was good, it was horrendous and I hope I never see it ever again and that this is finally it with this franchise – even though they did leave it open at the end like they always do.

IMDB says 7.3/10

Rotten Tomatoes says 22%

I say 4.0/10