Fast & Furious

“Where do you think they’re tak­ing us?” asks a dri­ver, held, along with his souped-up car, in the rear of a mov­ing truck. ​“It don’t mat­ter,” is the response he gets from Dominic ​‘Dom’ Toret­to (Vin Diesel), ​“we’re all just along for the ride now.” And so Dom sum­maris­es pre­cise­ly the way many view­ers will feel about Fast & Furi­ous, the fourth film in the high-octane fran­chise that began with Rob Cohen’s The Fast and the Furi­ous in 2001.

This is the first sequel to reunite the four leads from the orig­i­nal film – a move designed not just to cash in on the sort of cin­e­mat­ic nos­tal­gia that recent­ly brought us where-are-they-now updates on the likes of John McClane, Ram­bo, Indy and Rocky, but also to obvi­ate the need for any­thing but the most straight­for­ward char­ac­ter­i­sa­tion. It may be eight years since ille­gal rac­er Dom and thrill-addict­ed law­man Bri­an O’Conner (Paul Walk­er) last bumped and bond­ed on the LA streets, but once Dom comes out of hid­ing to avenge the mur­der of some­one dear, and the pair find them­selves pur­su­ing the same ruth­less drug baron from dif­fer­ent sides of the law, they are quick to slip right back into their old roles of badass heroes.

Just as this sequel’s title is a sleek­er, spar­er ver­sion of The Fast and the Furi­ous, so too the film itself has all the same essen­tial char­ac­ter dynam­ics as the orig­i­nal, but with­out hav­ing to waste any time estab­lish­ing them. Even the dia­logue here is a brisk series of non-sequiturs whose sole pur­pose is to get the plot mov­ing from one set-piece to the next as fast as pos­si­ble. Every­thing here cuts to the chase, with per­son­al­i­ties pre­sent­ed in a stream­lined short­hand, and dra­mat­ic plau­si­bil­i­ty sac­ri­ficed to the need for speed.

All of which is to say that Fast & Furi­ous races irre­sistibly towards its tar­get audi­ence of youngish men, while leav­ing every­one else in the dust. Female char­ac­ters are kept very much on the side (and offer the sort of dis­play les­bian­ism that is strict­ly for the male gaze), as the two leads (and their oppo­nents) engage in an ado­les­cent sort of homoso­cial play, siz­ing up one another’s engines before bang­ing and bash­ing togeth­er on the road.

For sure, there is plen­ty of fuel-inject­ed action, fast mov­ing and furi­ous­ly edit­ed – but for those who want a lit­tle more from their movies than adren­a­line-pumped spec­ta­cle, there is also some enter­tain­ment to be found in the film’s equiv­o­cal approach to sex­u­al­i­ty. Dom may nev­er lack a girl to look good beside him, but the way he relates to oth­er men always seems more important.

“I’m one of those boys who enjoys a fine body, what­ev­er the make,” he responds with stu­dious ambi­gu­i­ty when asked if he prefers cars to women – and the film’s ​‘explo­sive cli­max’, in which he dri­ves his phal­lic car head-on into (and through) the body of a male oppo­nent while utter­ing the con­temp­tu­ous quip ​‘pussy’, encap­su­lates the con­fused sex­u­al pol­i­tics that have in fact brand­ed the whole franchise.

It is, how­ev­er, less Cronenberg’s Crash than the con­flict­ed tra­vails of the aver­age teenage male’s psy­che. The rest of us are indeed just along for the ride.