Bad Movies We Love: The Fast and the Furious

I'm thrilled that Fast Five cuts the wobbly title The Fast and the Furious 5: Rio Heist down to the franchise's purest essence. TFATF:RH is so cumbersome. So baroque. But Fast Five? That sounds like a bad-ass Chili's appetizer platter or a failed Robin Antin burlesque troupe. Excellence! In a tube top! With a side of southwestern eggrolls! Perfection. Before you and your nitrous-huffing buddies head out to watch Vin Diesel steer more Popsicle-colored cars, revisit the movie that started it all: the definitively bad, the delicious trashy The Fast and the Furious.

I'm about to review The Fast and the Furious's plot, so I hope you have .07 seconds to spare. LAPD officer Brian O'Conner (Paul Walker) is sent undercover to bust well-known street racer Dom Toretto (Vin Diesel) and his crew of ride-pimpers, including Dom's girlfriend Letty (Michelle Rodriguez). Unfortunately, Brian enjoys DRIVIN DA CARZ, and he ends up competing against Dom in a drag race and soon helping him flee from the cops. They get along well! These alpha heroes from opposite sides of the tracks!

Here's a delicate lotus named Paul Walker. You'll notice he's everything that Ryan Phillippe is afraid to become: rugged, real, and yellow-blond. None of this platinum Dietrich nonsense. None of this Cruel Intentions frost. When it comes to big-screen stupidity, Mr. Walker commits like no one I've seen since Judy Holliday. Take this amazing scene where Walker starts a fight with one of Vin's cronies over the deliciousness of tuna.

I want to make sure I understand the line, "Get yourself a double cheese and fries for $2.99, f*ggot." Tuna is heterosexual food? Burgers are for fairies? What is a "double cheese"? Is this like Dogtooth, where everything is in code? Or is this all just... beautifully stupid? I'm thinking that. Remember Paul in Varsity Blues? That was stupid, too. The only contemporary competitor to Walker's brain-free reign is -- gosh, I guess his costar Vin Diesel. Here comes a new challenger!

And what a fine muscle-Koopa that man is. Vin Diesel is either a lovable action hero or an offensive Adam Sandler character. I can't tell which, but sketchy ambiguity is a Bad Movies We Love hallmark.

Jordana Brewster. According to the internet, she has never been called "Gasoline Ali MacGraw" before -- until now. Ahem. This girl is Gasoline Ali MacGraw. She even drives like Steve McQueen at times, which I suspect is director Rob Cohen's spiteful homage to Ms. MacGraw's ex. "What can you say about a 25-year-old girl who drives?"

Dom's main girl Letty is an angst-ridden meat morsel who pouts, broods, and snarls like the most disinterested babysitter ever. Such unjustified apathy would be fine except here's a hilarious note about Michelle Rodriguez: In Girlfight, the movie she made with first-time director Karyn Kusama prior to The Fast and the Furious, she won an Independent Spirit Award for Best Debut Performance. I miss that Michelle Rodriguez, the one who existed before getting stuck in a decade of boringly "tough" roles. Even her real-life incarceration was boring. So was (is?) that weird resistance to calling herself a bisexual. Guys, if she admits that she's bi, Hollywood directors will give all of Michelle's ingenue roles to Elle Fanning. The stakes are high. Respect.

Anyway, plenty of The Fast and the Furious's charms are charming. You can't go wrong with a first-reel Ja Rule cameo. It's always on time (feat. Ashanti)! Ted Levine, who plays Walker's co-worker Sgt. Tanner, spouts this incredible line about one of the bad guys: "He's got nitric oxide in his blood and a gas tank for a brain." And... Greta Garbo's standoff sighs? He's got Bette Davis eyes? Careful, Paul, Sgt. Tanner's rolling metaphors like dice!

The dumb car chases never linger too long, and the final blitz through the hilly streets of Los Angeles's hip Silver Lake/Echo Park area is suspenseful for all the wrong reasons. Will Paul pull over to peruse a farmer's market? Will Vin open a dancewear shop after this drag race? It's hard to ask yourself these difficult questions with the film's soundtrack throttling your eardrums, admittedly. Here's a spirited selection from that album now.

I hope you enjoyed this snippet from Limp Bizkit's Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water, you cretin. Now let's buy leotards and flats from Vin Diesel's quasi-Asian dance studio, The Tokyo Drift.