2 Fast 2 Furious

dir. Singleton

Opens Fri June 6

Various Theaters

My favorite part of The Fast and the Furious took place after the movie. One kid at the screening was so hyped up after seeing a flick concentrating solely on crime and street racing, that he hopped in his GTO, gunned the engine, and made a squealing peel-out of the parking lot. Unfortunately for him, he lost control of the car and ran up on the median where he got stuck. Even worse, he could only sit there and withstand the seemingly endless parade of mouth-covering laughers and finger-pointers.

And since I was one of those finger-pointers, I made certain to grab an aisle seat at the sequel, 2 Fast 2 Furious, so I would be first out in the parking lot to watch another punk make an ass out of himself. Disappointingly, nothing happened! Sure, there was some posturing from the high school Mitsubishi crowd, but on the way home there wasn't one pile of twisted rubble as a result of this movie. And that's good. I guess. But does this loss of blood loss bespeak well of a street racing movie?

In 2 Fast 2 Furious, Aryan hottie Paul Walker returns as disgraced former cop turned street racer, Brian. Now living in Miami, Brian is summoned by the pigs to infiltrate a money laundering cartel, but he refuses to do so without the help of his ol' racing buddy Roman (Tyrese)--who currently hates his stinking guts for reasons too insignificant to mention here. Will the two ex-friends patch up their relationship and bring the criminal to justice? I don't give a shit, just show me more hot chicks and cool racing scenes.

And happily for all concerned, 2 Fast 2 Furious does just that. While its predecessor made an attempt to show the inner-workings of the street racing elite, director John Singleton (Boyz N the Hood) concentrates on the gravy--sweet pieces of ass squeezing into Daisy Dukes, and white-knuckle race scenes that literally have you digging fingernails into your theater seat.

Everything is pumped up to cartoon level; the girls are so beautiful they're practically deformed, the cars are one milli-step away from the DeLorean featured in Back to the Future, and then there's Ludacris who seals the cartoony deal. And could this entertaining outlandishness be the reason why teens weren't wrapping their Hondas around telephone poles in the parking lot? Probably. But it's the first time a fun movie ruined the rest of my evening.