Sarah suggested I get the DVD player hooked back up, after months of disuse, so we could watch a movie. I complied. We argued good-naturedly about what to watch, and settled on "The Fast and the Furious," because we borrowed it from Kyle and needed to return it.
The next two hours can really only be expressed as
Some movies are so bad they're almost enjoyable. "Plan Nine from Outer Space" is the perfect example. "The Fast and the Furious" is just bad. Not "fun bad," just "bad bad." So bad it actually caused kidney failure. (Not really. But my pancreas hurts.) Okay, so the cars are cool. But they're not THAT cool. The action scenes basically consist of cars going in a straight line with some "interesting" camera angles.
Really, the best part of the movie was that the cop's (Paul Walker) direct superior was played by Ted Levine, most popularly known as Buffalo "Put The Lotion in the Fucking Basket" Bill from Silence of the Lambs. Sarah and I laughed about that the entire movie. "Don't you hurt my fucking dog!"
The main reason that the movie sucked is that the entire plot line, with almost no deviation whatsoever, was blatantly stolen from Point Break. Remember Point Break? That retarded Keanu Reeves/Patrick Swayze piece of shit? "Furious" was so blatantly stolen that it was clear Walker had done nothing but watch Point Break to learn every possible Keanu Reeves acting technique. ::sigh::
Let us go down the various plot points of each film and match them up:
| Fast and Furious | Point Break |
| Brian O'Connor, played by Paul "Keanu" Walker, begins hanging out with a local street racer gang, led by Dominic Toretto, played by Vin Diesel. | Johnny Utah, played by Keanu "Couldn't Act Dead If I Decapitated Him" Reeves, begins hanging out with a local surfer gang, led by Bodhi, played by Patrick Swayze. |
| O'Connor turns out to be a cop, investigating truck hijackings. Surprise, surprise. | Utah turns out to be FBI, investigating bank robberies. Surprise, surprise again. |
| Toretto is masterminding the hijackings. | Bodhi is masterminding the bank robberies. |
| Toretto's hot sister and O'Conner get they fuck on. | Some dirty slut that hangs out with the surfers and Utah get they fuck on. |
| At the end, O'Connor gives Toretto his car and lets him leave 'cause he's a damn retard. | At the end, Utah lets Bodhi go catch the monster wave that undoubtedly kills him. |
There were other things that irritated me too, like when they use O'Connor, an undercover cop, on a goddamn SWAT team. That was completely retarded. I mean, I don't ask for a lot of realism out of an action movie, but c'mon. Any po-po captain that would risk an undercover agent's cover by putting him on a SWAT team would get stabbed by the commissioner.
That and the part where O'Connor screeches to a halt sideways, picks up his handgun, and blazes away at a dude on a motorcycle who's riding away at about 90mph and is already 60-70 yards away. Of course, he hits him right in the side, killing him instantly. That kind of shit pisses me off. I couldn't do that, and I've qualified expert alongside Marines.
The best part of realism is where apparently these guys do nothing but race 1/4 mile street races. In incredibly fast, ostensibly "10 second" race cars. And how fast does each 1/4 mile race take? Between 25 and 50 seconds. I wanted to throw a shoe at the DVD player.
If I sound angry and bitter, it's because this movie has warped my fragile little mind, and I'm so completely disgusted that it sucked two full hours of my life away. It had some great lines, though:
O'Connor: "I just need more time."
FBI tool: "You want time, buy the damn magazine."
HA! HAHA! That was so funny I got wood. And stabbed myself in the eye with it.
I was just hoping O'Connor's sergeant would get the chance to say, "Wait...was she a great big fat person?" Oh well. Maybe in his next movie. Or else he gets the hose again.
Now, the average director would either start filming over with a new actor, or completely shelve the project. But Ed Wood is not your average director. So what he does is reuses a great deal of Lugosi's footage over and over throughout the picture, so that you get to see a scene of him walking scarily through a woods of some kind about 30047 times. Even better, for all the scenes they still had to film, Wood hired his psychiatrist to play the role, saying no lines and covering his face with his cape.
Did I mention the psychiatrist was 9 inches taller than Bela Lugosi? BEST . . . HORROR . . . MOVIE . . . EVER.