FilmBlather.com

"Say hi to your sister for me."

Here is a secret I discovered with some friends a couple of years back: putting Tokyo Drift after inappropriate movie titles is a joke that never gets old. Citizen Kane: Tokyo Drift! Wendy and Lucy: Tokyo Drift! Breakin' 3: Tokyo Drift! At one point, I tried to make "Tokyo Drift" contend for "that's what she said"-like ubiquity in the hipster lexicon. It didn't quite work, but I am grateful to The Fast and the Furious franchise for introducing me to a lovely pastime.

Fast & Furious, the definite-article-free third sequel, is no less instructive than The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. Among other things, it taught me that "nothing really matters unless you have a code." Paul Walker speaks that line maybe halfway through the film, his face a tumult of emotions like boredom, mild confusion and the munchies. I think he meant "moral code" rather than "combination," but I can't be 100% sure. Either way, a man's gotta have a code.

This is all a convoluted way of saying that this franchise is best described as "lovably retarded," and I kind of like it. I gave Tokyo Drift a C+, which is on the border of an honest-to-goodness recommendation. Fast & Furious is actually better in some ways, but it wastes so much time on tedious macho brooding that it gets a C. For most people, it's probably not worth the time. On the other hand, I spent most of the film chuckling merrily under my breath. If you've heard Vin Diesel described as an "angry potato" and found that concept unreasonably funny, you might be entertained by Fast & Furious.

On a substantive note, the movie suggests that Justin Lin might soon emerge as a preeminent action director. He is eventually defeated by the dumbass screenplay -- who thought it was a good idea, cinematically speaking, to set a high-speed car chase in tunnels barely wide and tall enough to fit a car? -- but a couple of sequences at the beginning of the film are remarkably lucid and exciting. The epic truck hijacking set piece that features prominently in the trailer wouldn't be out of place in a James Cameron film; it really is expertly staged, directed and edited. A footchase minutes later is the rare example of a shakycam sequence that is nonetheless comprehensible and has a sense of geography. It reminded me of Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's great handheld work in 28 Weeks Later.

Lin has to be laughing along with us at the exquisite silliness of the plot. Walker's intrepid Brian O'Conner -- an FBI-agent-turned-street-racer-turned-FBI-agent-turned-street-racer -- has to go undercover as, well, a street racer, to become a mule for a notorious drug smuggler. His longtime friend, adversary, and bad-ass Dominic Toretto (Diesel) also has it in for the smuggler, who apparently killed his girlfriend (Michelle Rodriguez, who's had about enough), so he joins in the fun. Why does the FBI need to send an undercover agent to bust up a drug smuggler who regularly holds elaborate drag races on the streets of Los Angeles, complete with hordes of women who are gyrating constantly? (That part is really amazing, actually.) I wonder if it has something to do with Paul Walker's code.

Anyway, Fast & Furious would have been a prime candidate for absurd, amiably dim-witted fun, but it inexplicably gets bogged down in a useless, talky midsection with a lot of testosterone-fueled posturing and bizarre soul-searching. ("Maybe you're not the good guy pretending to be the bad guy. Maybe you're the bad guy, pretending to be the good guy," O'Conner is told. "Ever think about that?") A movie that's going to bet heavily on our embracing its stupidity can't afford to get boring, but I was drumming my fingers on the armrest a half hour in.

I also note that the film is missing an awesomely awful subtitle, or even a grammatical perversion a la 2 Fast 2 Furious. Any suggestions for the fifth film? How about Fast & Furious: I'm Gonna Kick Your Ass? Or, no, I know: Fast & Furious: Tokyo Drift.

--Eugene Novikov