Fast & Furious

American bozos Vin Diesel & Paul Walker rekindle their bromance as street-racing ex-con & cop double act: Dominic Toretto & Brian O' Conner in part four of the vacuous, clichéd but consistently entertaining and hugely popular franchise. A saga that began in 2001 with Rob Cohen's guilty pleasure of a movie 'The Fast & The Furious' followed up by Oscar nominated auteur John Singleton's surprisingly good '2 Fast 2 Furious' (sans Diesel) and most recently, a brand new timeline with Justin Lin's 'The Fast & The Furious: Tokyo Drift' (which bridged its predecessors with a final act cameo by Diesel). Justin Lin marshals the chaos once more; in the hotly anticipated return of the film's original stars, including Michelle Rodriguez & Jordana Brewster. The wafer thin storyline barely warrants repetition and is frankly ludicrous, even more so than all the other 'F&F' pictures, in fact, story wise; 'Fast & Furious' is the weakest of the quartet: revving up, as it does, some divertive hokum about a cross-border smuggling cartel. 'Fast & Furious' opens with a bang: as Dom & Letty (Rodriguez) botch a daring tanker heist on a perilous stretch of mountain road, but soon fizzles out as the filmmakers, for reasons that go above and beyond baffling, begin to think they're shooting a movie that isn't 'The Fast & The Furious'. Someone should've told them that no one cares about flashbacks or subplots whilst few will even acknowledge their commendable attempt at narrative continuity (this being a prequel to 'Tokyo Drift', they mention the Han character as being Dom's ally in Asia). Some hot Russian chick turns up halfway and you begin to wonder why they invited Brewster & Rodriguez back, only to treat their characters as if they were odd items of unwanted furniture, disdainfully shuffled around the casualty bay at MFI. The original, however silly it may've been; had some memorable one-liners, a cool below-the-chassis truck-jack and an innovative, albeit CGI heavy, approach to the car race. 'F&F' on the other hand, more or less fails to deliver even the most basic requirements of a street racing movie (i.e. street racing), sure we get a mildly amusing sat-nav rally but where's the sealed off quarter mile or the tricked out signature rides that gave even the sketchiest of bit players some character? And if you've gone to the trouble of getting some aesthetically pleasing vehicles together in a line, why render the entire scene pointless by driving them through a cave? And yet despite its many, many flaws; fans will still delight in seeing familiar faces Dom & Brian, Starsky & Hutch for the ADD generation, back behind the wheel as our NOS powered petrolheads. Diesel after his disastrous foray into action-comedy with 'The Pacifier' and Walker after...well, pretty much every movie he's been in since '2 Fast 2 Furious' (notwithstanding a small part in 'Flags Of Our Fathers'). 'Fast & Furious' would've been an unwatchable, wet meringue of a movie had it not marked the return of buff behemoth Vin Diesel, now believe it or not, but they've actually set up another three possible sequels set in different narrative timelines! Who'll see them is anyone's guess, for 'Fast & Furious' rattles about the screen like a shot exhaust, and though the bodyworks good it takes a Herculean effort to push this stalled franchise over the finish line: They make it, but only just.