The Fast and the Furious (2001)

	Also Known As: -
	Year of first release: 2001
	Director: Rob Cohen (Daylight, Stealth, xXx, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor)
	Actors: Vin Diesel (Pitch Black, Riddick, xXx), Paul Walker, Michelle Rodriguez (Avatar)
	Country: USA
	Genre: Action, Thriller
	Conditions of visioning: 10.09.2019, Blu-ray, 40" TV screen
Synopsis: Los Angeles police officer Brian O'Conner (Walker) infiltrates the world of illegal street car racing to try and find a gang of thieves.
Review: I have a lot to say around this movie, maybe not so much about the movie itself. For a while now I have been thinking about watching the whole Fast and Furious saga (8 movies and a spin-off to date). The final push is when I saw a review of the saga by a YouTuber Marcus that had the same idea as me. At the same time, I wanted to start watching less series and more movies, and by movies I mean Blu-Rays and not VOD. So I bought the box-set of eight movies and started from the beginning, slid the disk in my old Blu-ray player that I hadn't used in three years and Waw!, even though I use a medium-quality TV and not my old projector, there is no comparison of image quality between a Blu-Ray and VOD (Netflix) that I am now too used to. Those online services may promise HD (or 4k), it is obvious that the compression has a strong effect on resolution, colors, contrast and depth of the darks. Now about the movie: it is the only one of the saga I had seen before and still is as I remembered it, except that I noticed many more sad details. If you have seen Point Break, you know from the first minute what will happen in this movie so forget about being surprised. Car chases? Yeah but almost only in straight lines as the contenders have to pass first the 1/4 mile line and they do it in less than 10 seconds (but more like a minute in movie time, go figure). I don't see the fun in that, the winner ends up being the one with the most powerful car, and the one that doesn't uses his Nitrogen Oxyde booster too early. But for me that's the extend of the talent one has to have to win... What you do get in this movie are crazy Star Wars-like light-speed effect when they start the booster, that's quite funny. The camera moves are also crazy, making you forget the cheapness of the background effects. And you get to see a lot of colorful tuned cars surrounded by shortly-dressed groupies. The soundtrack is fun (+1 for using a song by the Mexican band Molotov) but totally incoherent: Hip Hop, Electro, Techno, Rock, anything goes. It is nice to see Vin Diesel playing the usual tough guy, Michele Rodriguez overdoing the tough girl, but Paul Walker is quite bad. The story doesn't help, putting him for too long in situations with apparently no acting direction. The one thing that barely saves the movie is how extreme is Brian's decision when it comes to take a side. There for a moment we see some magic between actors, but that's fleeting. And then the movie ends. It was fun to watch for historical reasons, knowing that it will lead to such huge better-done blockbusters, but it is otherwise quite bad. I may revise the rating when I have seen more from the saga.
Rating: 4 /10