Review: Fast and Furious

Trailer of Fast & Furious

Detroit may be floundering, but there's still something sexy about a muscle car. Or so the folks behind the F&F franchise seem to think, as they bring Vin Diesel back to the wheel of various chrome-gilded beasts for the fourth installment in the series.

Diesel was, you may recall, absent from F&F 2 and Tokyo Drift. He's joined in his return by the latter's director, Justin Lin, as well as by the full cast of the first F&F. It's a victory lap of sorts fueled by an assembly-line plot that pits Diesel's hustler and his FBI nemesis, O'Conner (Paul Walker), at opposite ends of a Mexican-border drug-running scheme.

The payoff comes in the revved-up car chases (though the egregious use of FX stalls out the thrills) and the electric ambiance of the late-night drag-racing scene (gangstas and near-naked babes required). The gaseous exposition in the middle, however, breaks down. Lin should have heeded his film's title and just punched it.