Hollywood—
Well, there we were at the premiere of "2Fast 2Furious" at the Universal Amphitheater with 1500 other people, gawking like rubes at the motley collection of female starlets, bit-players and wannabes parading down the red carpet with us. It was all very Hollywood, as is this movie.
This flick has some socially redeeming value, but none of it has much to do with the action of the film itself. As you know, it's a caper-type movie that's all about bags of money, which is the kind of thing that Hollywood people find more interesting than anything else. Such story lines are always the choice of directors, screenwriters and production executives who are too lazy to leave the world of comic-book fantasy. This is not a bad guns-and-money caper, but it's a reminder that Michael Mann's "Miami Vice" achieved far more dramatic impact in a simple hour of television back in the 1980s.
This is not a movie about street racing, either. Car culture provides a distant background for the action, as if the creative people observed it while looking through the wrong end of a telescope. All the conventions of street racing are in place, but they are portrayed by the kind of people who believe that costuming is more important than content.
In fact, overwrought costuming might be a theme here. The characters are dressed up in an MTV style that is so five-minutes-ago. The cars themselves feature big wings and zippy paint, which is far from the JDM (Japanese Domestic Market) look that is actually happening on the street. The fact that the action takes place in a neon-lit Miami tells you that—culturally speaking—this movie is from long ago and far, far away.
But the cars in action do look good. The dynamics of fast driving come across in a surprisingly effective fashion, thanks largely to the work by second-unit director Terry Leonard and some clever editing, and the driving gives the movie it's only real energy. Even the special effects have been used (for once) to reveal reality instead of to simply replace it, as a number of sequences give you a sense that these are real machines instead of candy-colored props. The sound of the cars is particularly satisfying, notably the bark of the Nissan Skyline GT-R's twin-turbo in-line six-cylinder, which is wonderfully realistic right down to the clatter of the turbos on over-run.
Naturally, the cars look stupid every time director John Singleton tries to harness them to the plot action. Cars are always leaping great distances through the air, spitting out flames, or shifting into nitrous-oxide hyperdrive. One especially silly sequence has the leading character leaning out of the driver's window at speed and pulling a kind of ECU-killing taser out of the fender, a version of the movie convention in which a pilot is always crawling out on the wing of his aircraft to fix one thing or another.
This witlessness about the mechanical character of the automobile predictably riddles "2Fast 2Furious," just as it has every other big budget Hollywood flick about cars, from "Days of Thunder" to "Smokey and the Bandit." It's silly to expect more, really. After all, the people in Hollywood are not men and women of action. They sit in dark rooms, observing life at a distance. They are dealmakers, and the only device they use in their daily lives is the telephone. For them, the car is just a costume.
For all this predictable disappointment with the portrayal of the automobile in "2Fast 2Furious," there are some interesting things that this movie shows us about cars.
First, most of the movie cars didn't require much in the way of modifications to go through their paces. The lime-gold Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution VII is mechanically the same as it came off the production line. The pink Honda S2000 has a supercharger and big tires, and actually is pretty fast. The '69 Chevy Camaro with its 427-cubic-inch V-8 isn't a real Yenko-built car, but it's a clone right down to the antiquated suspension. The Toyota Supra has big Greddy turbocharger, while the silver Skyline GT-R R34 had the drive system to the front wheels disabled to make it behave with more drama. The red Mazda RX-7 is stone stock. Each of these cars had its own mini-fleet of stunt doubles, many of which didn't survive the filming, but few modifications were required to deliver extreme action, which shows you just how good modern cars have become.
Second, whatever realism this movie achieves in terms of automotive action actually comes from the world of video games. Director John Singleton made no bones about attempting to capture the feel of a video game, and indeed his creaky storyline isn't even as good as that offered by many role-playing games for home computers. The good thing is, video game producers have been very scrupulous about modeling the real-world dynamics of automobiles, and their extraordinary work has kept costume specialists like Singleton from taking even more liberties with the world of high-speed physics. One of the best sequences in the film comes with the digitized cars that underlay the concluding credits, a promotion for the "2Fast 2Furious" video game soon to be in stores (along with a million other items of merchandise being co-marketed with this movie).
So the great movie about street racing culture remains yet to be made, as this simple-minded cops-and-robbers movie has nothing to do with the world as we know it. It turns out that the most interesting film work being done with the automobile is featured on the Internet, notably the promotional films from BMW and Nissan.
Traditional Hollywood filmmakers should take note and be very, very afraid.
"2Fast 2Furious" is just what you expected, which is what the producers were after. It's not 2Bad, but not 2Good, either. Think of it as the Pontiac Grand Am of action movies. Bring popcorn.