Fast & Furious: Auto Eroticism

6 minute read
Richard Corliss

You could call him Vin (The Refrigerator) Diesel: he’s that solid, that cool, and precisely as emotive as your average kitchen appliance. The star of such red-meat melodramas as The Chronicles of Riddick and xXx has the huge, smooth head of an outdoor sculpture, a bad Buddha, and the dull eyes and mouth of a golem who’s just been recklessly woken. His screen personality could be seen as surly or resentful — in the Clint Eastwood Dirty Harry or Toshiro Mifune Yojimbo mode — if he displayed anything as human as an attitude. Instead he simply looms and emits fumes; he just is. He can read lines and move about, but there’s no inner life to this Refrigerator; when you shut the door, the light goes out. (Read the Q&A with Vin Diesel.)

Which makes Diesel — a great stage name (his real one is Mark Vincent) for an actor who seems motor-driven — ideal as the headliner of special-effects action films like this weekend’s Fast & Furious, the fourth in a series that launched in 2001 and has now been stripped of its definite articles because, in Hollywood, thes are for wimps. In a car-demolition picture like F&F, the real work in the driving and fighting and jumping scenes is done by stuntmen and computer nerds, but the stories require a stoic male presence, and that, Diesel provides to the teen boys who constitute such a movie’s core audience. Like Stallone and Schwarzenegger and the other Incredible Bulks who preceded him, Diesel exudes an impersonal toughness; he’s the machine at the heart of a movie machine. (See pictures of American muscle cars in movies.)

The considerable artistic coup of the producers and director Justin Lin (who also helmed the third episode, Tokyo Drift) is to reunite the cast of the 2001 film: Diesel as superdriver Dominic Toretto, Paul Walker as FBI agent Brian O’Conner, Jordana Brewster as Dom’s sister Mia and Michelle Rodriguez as his girlfriend Letty. Iconographically, the two male leads balance nicely, since Walker boasts California good looks — half surfer boy, half altar boy — and a face that reads as clean-shaven even with his careful stubble. And Diesel and M-Rod are a perfect pair. She showed off her muscular arms in Girlfight nearly a decade before America fixated on Michelle Obama’s pythons, while Diesel has biceps the size of Barack Obama’s governing challenges.

Boiled down to its essentials, F&F is four pretty swell auto-race video games — on a highway, across city streets, through a mountain tunnel, then in an all-terrain chase with a tunnel reprise — encased in the bloated carcass of a script by Chris Morgan that must have been researched in the Archive of Movie Clichés. In these interminable interstices, audiences in the theater can take a popcorn break or enjoy a snooze. Viewers of the DVD are luckier; they know how to find scene selection.

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The first race has Dom tooling down a circuitous highway while Letty hangs by a strap on the back of a huge semi speeding just in front of him. (It’s just as well Rodriguez isn’t at the wheel; as fans of thesmokinggun.com know, the actress does not have an exemplary driving record.) Letty manages to slip into Dom’s car just before the truck crashes and explodes. But the semi hasn’t completed its mischief: it starts tumbling toward them. With no escape, Dom guns his car toward the truck, which, following the physical laws of action movies (cf. Live Free or Die Hard), can be counted on to flip and roll just enough so that Dom can drive under it.

Lin or Morgan or the stunt supervisors may have peeked at the 1954 car-chase movie called The Fast and the Furious, which also begins with a truck careering down a winding road, crashing and bursting into flames — except in the original, the whole thing took exactly 10 seconds. The opening scene runs about 10 minutes and is a smartly choreographed ballet mécanique. But Rodriguez’s character isn’t around much longer; Letty gets killed soon after. Fortunately, when Dom examines the crime scene, he turns out to have skills as both a specialist in tire-tread forensics and a bit of a psychic profiler: he can “see” the events leading to Letty’s death — including the identity of the creep who killed her.

Back in L.A., Toretto tracks the gang responsible for the murder, as well as for that pesky Mexico-U.S. drug-running you may have read about recently. He and Brian, whom Dom has never forgiven for falling in love with Mia, quickly infiltrate the gang. They’re hired by Campos (John Ortiz), a mouthy middleman, to drive $60 million in heroin bricks across the border for a mysterious pan-American scurvisto named Braga, whose identity gets a longer buildup than Orson Welles’ Harry Lime did in The Third Man. There’s a little more plot and a lot more sensational driving, all in aid of reconciling Toretto and O’Conner. Given the Elmer’s Glue of male-bonding movies, no girls will be allowed to drive; F&F is machismo with a stick shift. The guys are all members of a stud fraternity, a penile colony. The only eroticism is auto.

In this stag universe, Diesel is the alpha and the omega male. One scene has him dangling a suspect from the high window of a tenement, then letting him go. Diesel fans know that if you let him into your apartment, you’d better clear the knickknacks off your freestanding shelving, because he’s bound to throw somebody into it. Anybody else does this, you’d say he has anger issues — or, considering his character’s surname, Toretto’s syndrome. But Diesel doesn’t get mad; he stays cooler than cool. The guy’s an icebox.

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