Fast and Furious

Fast and Furious, the fourth of a series that stated with 2001's The Fast and the Furious may be a box office champ but it's a chump action flick with plot holes a mile wide. Even a routine Jason Statham starrer like the Transporter films has F&F beat for excitement chops. Fast and Furious represents the triumph of marketing over content, what with the original cast - Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Michelle Rodriguez and Jordanna Brewster - reunited in what actually turns out to be the single high profile film that any of them has made in years.
Diesel has had his share of flops like the Riddick thing and the botched version of Babylon A.D. while Walker has perhaps been the most fortunate getting by on his surfer dude looks with leading roles in mostly bland films. The main exception is that Walker has managed to appear in some very cool films over the years like Pleasantville, Running Scared or Joy Ride while Diesel gets no traction when he tries to actually act as in Lumet's underrated Find Me Guilty. Brewster and Rodriguez would otherwise be forgotten save for their association with F&F.
Director Justin Lin (also helmed the third installment Tokyo Drift) rushes through exposition scenes that work in films with good directors. Explain how something like Miami Vice directed by Michael Mann can actually be enjoyable and make sense with the same plot details (busting a drug smuggling cartel). Lin doesn't seem to care if Fast and Furious makes sense from an action choreography point of view and he hardly even finds time to fetishize the cars, the main ingredient on display. Car races start and stop without any real feel for the mean streets on which they thread. Lin wastes too much time with GPS graphics combined with studio shots of the drivers that do nothing more than push in on the actor while the car sways on a gimbal.
F&F starts out with Diesel and Rodriguez hijacking a gas tanker in the Dominican Republic. You've never seen a tanker this long and you've never witnessed the ease with which the furious ones leap from speeding cars to the top of the tanker. After this useless sequence the action shifts to L.A. and Diesel hooking up with his sis (Brewster). Walker, currently with the FBI in L.A. gets wind of Vin and enlists him to help bring down a drug kingpin he's been investigating.
There's a chase through a US/Mexico border tunnel that's just ridiculous even in comparison to what's come before. There's barely enough room to stand in the tunnel yet when the action warrants a car will flip over and explode without impacting the other cars in queue. This part of F&F plays so much like a video game that one character can be heard saying "Game over."
Fast and Furious was not made for a demanding audience. Anyone seeking true muscle car momentum should find a copy of Breaking Point or Bullitt or more recently Deathproof. The only place F&F will win a race is for bad sequels.