Cars, money, drugs, women, sex – any one of these five things will make any movie fare well with the male demographic. Combine some of them and you have a good showing on your hands. Put all of them together and you have what should amount to a blockbuster, and you should be raking in the dough. This is what Fast & Furious attempts to do when it mixes sweet cars, sexy women, and lots of booze into one movie. At a gross of nearly 350 million dollars (to date), the movie easily was that blockbuster, even though it was a critical flop.

Fast & Furious starts off in the Dominican Republic where Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and his team are busy trying to steal gasoline tankers and sell the fuel for cash. After pulling off one such heist, the crew learns that the cops are hot on their trail and they all start to split up. Toretto goes down to Panama for awhile, until he is alerted that his girlfriend, Letty (Michelle Rodriguez ) has been murdered. He heads home for the funeral, and starts to plan his revenge.

After a cut scene, the movie quickly catches you up on what FBI agent Brian O'Conner (Paul Walker) is up to. O’Conner is running around the country chasing a drug dealer named Arturo Braga (note: I see the similarities in the last name, but this fictional character is not related to myself), and needs to crack the case or lose his job. Really, that is all he has been doing between this movie and the franchise's previous installment.

Somewhere, along the way, O’Conner meets up with Toretto and they team up to fight the bad guys together. Using information from the FBI, muscle cars that have been impounded by local cops, and lots of guns, the two go throughout the world to take down Braga. Of course, there are lots of explosions, a large disregard for the law, and an ignorance of jurisdiction throughout the movie.

Look at that all-American muscle
Frankly, it surprises me that Fast & Furious had a plot longer than a few pages. The storyline fits together, though it has its potholes — why two enemies, O’Conner and Toretto, would actually work together is the main one --  and actually manages to last the length of the movie. As the entire film is about special effects and racing, I expected the plot to be similar in size to that of a porno; while it is longer, the plot is not that much better.

Article Author: Robert M. Barga

Robert M. Barga is a student at The Ohio State University (Go Bucks) and is majoring in Political Science, with an American Policy focus, and minoring in English. He is an avid blogger on Whalertly, technology guru, and gamer (computer, table-top, and console). …

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