The Fast and The Furious

The Fast and the Furious is a fad culture magazine article come to life; Saturday Night Fever for petrolheads. Paul Walker plays a dweeby undercover cop scrambling to get an in with Vin Diesel's cool crime gang by making a series of incompetent racing gestures. Although working with a similar framework as Point Break, the identity lines never get quite so blurred. For a start there's never any real sense that Walker's cop gives much of a shit about enforcing the law. Instead he's a skate-punk white kid there to brush shoulders with a minority dominated subculture. Enlivened by a series of car clashes that stress personal danger as much as speed, First Fast is ultimately a high school idea of reality - there is no authority greater than the guy you deify.