Hola all. Massawyrm here.

Hell yes. After two lame attempts, Diesel pricing himself out to pursue other endeavors and a whole lot of eye rolling, THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS finally has its true sequel. FAST & FURIOUS explodes on the screen with the same over-the-top insanity of the first film, with all the 13-year-old pleasing antics that made so many of us fall in love with the film the franchise the first time around. That’s not to say it’s a great film or even completely on par with the first – but it is awesome, a lot of fun and everything one would hope to get out of a F&TF movie.

The film opens with what we all saw in the first trailer and just goes bugfuck crazy from there. The stunts are wilder, the chases more hard core and the street racing (what little there actually is this time around) is far more intense. Everything is ramped up in the way you expect from a sequel – and there isn’t a single weak action moment to be found anywhere within. You’d think by this point in the series that we’d seen it all – but they pull out a number of tricks that takes this run down clunker of a franchise and gets her motor purring like she was brand new. If there’s anything this reminds me of, it is Stallone’s latest films ROCKY BALBOA and RAMBO. This doesn’t try to reinvent the series. It aims to recapture everything that worked about it in the beginning, and in that way makes it fresh.

Vin is back and in top form, proving that his tired performance in last year’s BABYLON A.D. was in fact what he was trying to do with his character and not a marked drop in his ability to embody the essence of a living action figure. He drives fast, he fires off cool as all hell one liners and he beats the hell out of people who fuck with him. Yeah. It’s pretty much everything you want out of him. Meanwhile, Paul Walker used his downtime to work with directors who knew how to get real performances out of his actors and learned how to emote beyond the two expressions he used to alternate between (serious and smirking), turning in a truly bad ass performance in his own right. There’s one scene in particular that punctuates just what kind of effect exposure to Dominic Toretto has done for him not to mention what kind of badass he’s become in his own right.

Picking up five years after the first film, the plot seems to run a little close to the plot of the second (2 FAST 2 CURIOUS), leading me to believe that this might have been mined from the original (and sadly abandoned) script to the sequel that got dumped when Vin priced himself out to go do CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK. With Vin out, the writers felt that it didn’t make sense to bring back Brewster or Rodriguez, thus they put together a film out of the remnants of what remained. Well, this could very well have been that second film. It sure as hell feels like it. While the continuity of the other two still exists here, it is far and away superior to both of those sad attempts.

Everybody coming back works in this, especially Jordana Brewster who is mysteriously dressed as a Sunday school teacher and exists in a universe in which we’re supposed to believe that 20 guys a minute aren’t trying to hook up with her at any given time – leaving her nice and single for Paul Walker’s return. The film does a nice job of taking all of the previously unresolved emotions and amplifying them just right to pick up right where they left off. This is a true continuation rather than just a FURTHER ADVENTURES OF… film.

That said, while it is a worthy sequel it isn’t as great as the original. It is fun and raucous with plenty of great moments, but it lacks the full power of the original – nothing unexpected with it being a sequel and all. But there’s nothing WRONG with it. Justin Lin does a great job here and fully redeems himself for the mess of the last film. I gave him a fairly rough go last time around, but this is a film more in tune with the talent we all saw from him early on. This movie is lean, mean and fires on all cylinders – and it is clear that a lot of that credit goes to Lin.

Look, you pretty much know whether this is up your alley or not. But if you’re the type of guy who dug the hell out of the first film and looked at this trailer with hope and wonder whether it could recapture that old magic at all, know now that it does. It’s well worth seeing big and loud and with a rowdy crowd. Enjoy it. It’s one of those rare sequels that does exactly what it is supposed to.

Until next time friends, smoke ‘em if ya got ‘em.

Massawyrm

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