More Fun, Furiously
Enticed again to watch more of the Fast and Furious franchise, I conclude, having seen 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003), that the series is junk food cinema--you want to keep crunching the Cheetos.
Beginning with its hang-loose-with-English-grammatical-conventions title, 2 Fast 2 Furious
embraces the fantastic world of street racing presented video game style.
Again, undercover man Brian (Paul Walker) gets saddled with another task working for the FBI and police, this time in Miami. The job is to infiltrate crooked export-import man Carter Verone's (Cole Hauser) operation. Brian insists on the assistance of driver Roman (Tyrese) an ankle bracelet wearing ex-con given the chance for a clean record if he comes through on the Verone job.
Verone, it turns out, has a spectacular-looking girlfriend (Eva Mendes), in reality a Customs agent working a long burn against her "boyfriend." Verone turns out to be a well-spoken, polite-seeming psychopath with an enthusiasm for novel forms of torture, such as when he traps a rat in a metal bucket held forcefully against a man's belly while the bucket gets heated with a blowtorch, making the rat eventually gnaw into the body beneath to escape the heat.
This PG-13 scene (yes, the film is PG-13) is the only sickening one. Mostly, the film is about cars, shiny lovely speed vehicles, nitrous oxide canisters, the beauty of a hundred at least young women in shorts, bikinis, tight dresses. Not as good as the first film, 2 Fast 2 Furious suffers from the lack of Vin Diesel and Michelle Rodriguez. Tyrese, though, is a good actor. He portrays his role convincingly, a realistic character in a comic book-type movie.
Paul Walker comes across somehow as younger and more optimistic, as if he's having fun infiltrating a rich nutcase's organization, flirting with the bombshell Eva Mendes. Even after the horrible rat/bucket scene, he's breezy and wisecracking, as if we're watching America getting used to inflicting pain on the helpless. The film was made about a year after 9/11, before the invasion of Iraq. It retains the sense that governmental organizations, like the FBI, though flawed, have the backs of the common person. Brian will come through for the federal government, recovering piles of cash from the villain, Carter Verone, the film will end with laughter.
Someone I know who's seen most of the series said the films become more and more preposterous. I'm going to keep watching, nevertheless. The entertainment factor is too strong to keep me away. I'm also looking forward to finding out what happened to Diesel's character, Dom Toretto, and his hot girlfriend, Letty, played by Michelle Rodriguez.
Vic Neptune
Enticed again to watch more of the Fast and Furious franchise, I conclude, having seen 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003), that the series is junk food cinema--you want to keep crunching the Cheetos.
Beginning with its hang-loose-with-English-grammatical-conventions title, 2 Fast 2 Furious
embraces the fantastic world of street racing presented video game style.
Again, undercover man Brian (Paul Walker) gets saddled with another task working for the FBI and police, this time in Miami. The job is to infiltrate crooked export-import man Carter Verone's (Cole Hauser) operation. Brian insists on the assistance of driver Roman (Tyrese) an ankle bracelet wearing ex-con given the chance for a clean record if he comes through on the Verone job.
Verone, it turns out, has a spectacular-looking girlfriend (Eva Mendes), in reality a Customs agent working a long burn against her "boyfriend." Verone turns out to be a well-spoken, polite-seeming psychopath with an enthusiasm for novel forms of torture, such as when he traps a rat in a metal bucket held forcefully against a man's belly while the bucket gets heated with a blowtorch, making the rat eventually gnaw into the body beneath to escape the heat.
This PG-13 scene (yes, the film is PG-13) is the only sickening one. Mostly, the film is about cars, shiny lovely speed vehicles, nitrous oxide canisters, the beauty of a hundred at least young women in shorts, bikinis, tight dresses. Not as good as the first film, 2 Fast 2 Furious suffers from the lack of Vin Diesel and Michelle Rodriguez. Tyrese, though, is a good actor. He portrays his role convincingly, a realistic character in a comic book-type movie.
Paul Walker comes across somehow as younger and more optimistic, as if he's having fun infiltrating a rich nutcase's organization, flirting with the bombshell Eva Mendes. Even after the horrible rat/bucket scene, he's breezy and wisecracking, as if we're watching America getting used to inflicting pain on the helpless. The film was made about a year after 9/11, before the invasion of Iraq. It retains the sense that governmental organizations, like the FBI, though flawed, have the backs of the common person. Brian will come through for the federal government, recovering piles of cash from the villain, Carter Verone, the film will end with laughter.
Someone I know who's seen most of the series said the films become more and more preposterous. I'm going to keep watching, nevertheless. The entertainment factor is too strong to keep me away. I'm also looking forward to finding out what happened to Diesel's character, Dom Toretto, and his hot girlfriend, Letty, played by Michelle Rodriguez.
Vic Neptune
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