I don't ask for much from summer popcorn movies. Give me some car chases and explosions, some romance, and a nasty villain who meets a nastier end, and I'm happy. I had high hopes for
The Fast and the Furious to be a classic of this genre, but it turned out to be a numbing waste of celluloid, a bad, bad movie that cannot even fake authenticity. It is not about what is cool or about what the people in the audience think is cool. It is about what people in Hollywood think that the people in the audience think is cool.
There is a lot of posing and attitude, and nearly every line is a cliché, spoken without any sense of irony, tribute, or transcendence. There is some flashy photography, a lot of blasting faux-hip rap music, very fine cars, and sprays of automatic weapon bullets that manage to miss all the main characters. The last fifteen minutes is genuinely, deeply, infuriatingly stupid. Diesel and Rodriguez are talented and watchable, but this movie insists on interfering with our ability to enjoy them.