Zombies of Mass Destruction

I wish Zombies of Mass Destruction was better. I really do, for a variety of reasons. First, it was produced in Seattle, my town, and I like it when the locals do something good. Secondly, a friend of mine wrote the script, at least in part. (He is a good writer, I swear, it just isn’t on display here) And thirdly, I’m in it. I got to be an extra one night when the production crew picked up some additional shots they missed during principle photography. At 48:30 there is a shadowy figure shuffling around at the tree line. (I was this close—imagine me holding my fingers half an inch apart—to being a zombie that gets stabbed in the crotch and spews blood from a crotch-mounted blood cannon, but we ran out of darkness.) In reality all you can see is the picture on the front of my hoodie, but it is enough to identify me.

Like I said, I really wanted it to be good, but it just isn’t.

In the idyllic, picturesque island town of Port Gamble, Washington (which isn’t really an island at all, but I’ll let that slide), all is not as wholesome as it seems. Beneath the small-town veneer lurks an ugly undercurrent of racism and political discontent. Frida Abbas (Janette Armand), Iranian by descent though she was born and raised in Port Gamble, feels this firsthand. She recently dropped out of Princeton and returned home. Her ignorant, lily-white neighbors treat her differently, never quite accepting of her or her Muslim father as “real Americans”, and mistakenly calling her Iraqi over and over. Even her boyfriend subtly belittles Frida and her heritage.

Tom Hunt (Doug Fahl) is another Port Gamble-ite. He escaped to New York and now returns years later with his ultra-gay boyfriend, Lance (Cooper Hopkins), in order to come out to his mother and stop hiding his true self.

But something is amiss in the community. Namely zombies. A nefarious terrorist has unleashed a biological weapon that turns its victims into flesh eating undead cannibals. Of course the prime location for a terrorist attack is a small, isolated town in Washington. (And somehow the national news knows of this attack before any of the citizens of Port Gamble. Curious.) Over the course of the infection, the town’s latent racism and homophobia boil up to the surface, and Frida, Tom, and Lance encounter all manner of trouble because of their differences.

Zombies of Mass Destruction falls into the same category as movies like Dead Snow. It tries to be a comedy, it tries so damn hard, and that is what ultimately causes the film to fail. We get it, Shaun of the Dead was funny, but that doesn’t mean that every fucking zombie movie has to be god damned comedy. (Zombieland is the exception, it is legitimately funny.) Director/writer Kevin Hamademi and writer Ramon Isao spend too much time and effort trying to be funny, trying to force jokes and moments of levity into places where they don’t fit. The humor just doesn’t work. The jokes that try to be subtle aren’t clever enough to be funny, and the ones that try to be over the top funny aren’t big enough to elicit more than a mild chuckle (if that). This is one more example of the adage about comedy being the most difficult genre to write.

If the filmmakers had simply let the movie run its course as a zombie movie, without fishing for laughs, it would be much more effective. It still wouldn’t have been great, the acting never feels quite natural enough to be taken seriously, but it would have been better. The set up is there, and the gore and effects could have carried it through. Tom Devlin from 1313fx does a great job, an impressively good job, especially considering the budget and production scale. It is as good as anything I’ve seen recently.

Letting the movie play out as a horror would also better serve the political aspirations of the movie. It wants to make some wide reaching point about the war in Iraq, intolerance of other ways of life, religious fanaticism, and how seemingly ideal appearances can hide ugliness. These are worthy goals, but they are dealt with too simplistically, too bluntly, to make any sort of coherent statement. We never really connect with the protagonists, and consequently there is little emotional investment with them. The secondary characters are little more than caricatures, one-dimensional racists and religious fanatics. You can get away with that, but the caricatures have to be caricatures for a reason, they have to take the stereotypes to the extreme. Instead they are wind up limp and mild. The sinister preacher isn’t sinister enough to be frightening. The racist redneck isn’t racist or redneck enough to inspire dread. (He doesn’t even have a gun for god’s sake, what kind of self-respecting hillbilly doesn’t have a small arsenal stashed in his closet?) They are not taken far enough to be effective in the way they are intended to be. It feels false, like kids who grew up in the city mocking small town life without ever actually experiencing it for real. This small town is what TV and movies have told them a small town is like.

ZMD bounces back and forth between humor and seriousness, between horror and comedy, and because of this lack of focus, doesn’t work in either capacity.

Dead Snow

A couple of years ago, when I first heard about Norwegian zombie movie, Dead Snow, I was completely psyched. Not only were the viral teasers super awesome, but it was also a revamping of one of my favorite, and most ludicrous subgenres of horror, the Nazi Zombie film. The only way the idea could have been better was if it was Nazi zombies emerging out of bodies of water, like Shock Waves and Zombie Lake, but I’ll take what I can get.

After the initial buzz, the news quieted down for a spell, and I went on about my life, Norwegian Nazi zombie free. When the movie was ultimately release in 2009, it met with overwhelmingly tepid reviews. Is this another case where pre-release hype doomed an otherwise worthy movie that couldn’t possibly live up to all of the advanced hoopla, or is Dead Snow really just nothing special?

My answer is, probably a little bit of both.

Dead Snow starts like so many horror movies start, a group of friends, Norwegian med students, head to a remote cabin in the snowy mountains for the weekend, far away from everything, and where cell phones don’t work. Cue ominous music. They immediately get down to the business of having lighthearted fun in a winter wonderland, and when they finally settle in for the night the standard creepy local coot, out for a stroll in the middle of a deserted, snow covered forest, stops by, demands a cup of coffee, and fills these spoiled-brat city-kids in on the sinister past of the region. Turns out that during World War II the Nazis used this region as a submarine base. Seeing as Nazis are the bad guys, they treated the local populace quite brutally. When the Nazis looted all the valuables from the area, that was the last straw, and the inhabitants rose up and chased the Nazis into the mountains, where they theoretically froze to death, never to be seen again.

You can imagine a rough approximation of what happens next.

As a straight up zombie movie, Dead Snow works pretty well. It certainly doesn’t break any new ground, but within the teenagers-in-the-woods-facing-an-unspeakable-horror framework, it is solid and enjoyable.

The problems arise when writer/director Tommy Wirkola tries to make it something more. It tries really hard to be one of those tongue-in-cheek horror movies where the characters are hip and young and aware of all the archetypes and rules of the genre. Early on the characters reference the Evil Dead movies, and one of the friends even wears a Braindead t-shirt. It feels forced, unnecessary, and even a little insulting.

When the film sticks to horror it works, but then they try to be funny. This is where it starts to fail. There are funny moments that simply happen within the frame of the story, that happen organically, and those are fine, but there are more moments where jokes are inserted into the script. These fall flat and induce groans.

I know deconstructing the causal logic and storytelling of a zombie movie can be self-defeating, but throughout I kept coming back to one question. Why now? It has been more than fifty years since the end of the war, so why are the Nazi zombies emerging now? They are obviously driven by the need to repossess their plundered gold. (It feels like there is a curse on the treasure, some connection that draws them towards it, but that is never addressed.) And obviously, someone, somewhere, found the treasure before the med students, so why didn’t Nazi zombies reanimate and reclaim what was theirs earlier? There is an element of legend, of internal mythos, that seems to be missing from the story. This isn’t a huge distraction, but again, I keep coming back to the question, why now?

Dead Snow is worth a watch for fans of the genre. It has legitimately good moments, as well as faults. If the filmmakers simply made a straightforward zombie movie, without trying to be cute and clever, it would be much more successful, despite being a standard, paint-by-numbers horror flick.

Sukiyaki Western Django

Sergio Corbucci’s Django is one of the greatest spaghetti westerns of all time. Only the Man With No Name trilogy and a select few others are even in the same league. It is also rumored to have spawned somewhere between thirty to one hundred unofficial sequels depending on who you believe. Seriously, everyone is up on the Django train, and in 2007, Japan’s reigning auteur of violence, Takeshi Miike, climbed aboard with Sukiyaki Western Django.

Miike is most known for, and his best movies are, his blood-drenched crime epics, like Ichi the Killer and the Dead or Alive trilogy, and his horror/suspense movies, like Audition. He also has a tendency to go slightly bat shit fucking crazy, and the end result is a movie like The Happiness of the Katakuris, a sort of surrealist horror comedy musical with claymation.

Spaghetti westerns as an institution are an interesting proposition. They are the reimagining of the myth of the American West through the eyes of a foreign consciousness, taking a piece of Americana, something already wildly romanticized and largely fictional, and then translating and recontextualizing it to fit into another framework. Sukiyaki Western Django does this one better. Not only is this a reimagining of the myth of the American West, but it is a reimagining of the myth of the American West that has already been filtered through the Italian consciousness, and which is in turn run through the gaze of a wing-nut Japanese hipster. Miike tries to connect the Italian image of the ultraviolent American frontier with Japan’s feudal history and the culture of the samurai.

There are a lot of things I want to like about this movie. The prologue is a nod to the panoramic, Monument Valley, Technicolor films of John Ford, the ones where every color brilliantly contrasts with every other color; there are star crossed lovers; betrayal and vengeance; and the overall level of violence that we have come to expect from Miike’s films. I want to like Sukiyaki Western Django, but it falls incredibly flat.

The story is bland, spaghetti western fare. A stranger comes into a town where two factions battle over treasure. There was a couple, one from each clan, who tried to buck the system and marry, only the man is betrayed and murdered, and the woman falls into an alcoholic stupor while waiting to exact revenge. There is some shooting, some double-crossing, you get the picture.

The biggest problem with the story is not that it is uninspired, the problem it is that it is unfocused. There is no discernable protagonist. In theory, the black clad stranger is the primary locus of the story, that’s how the formula goes. But here the narrative bounces around from one character to another. Is this the history of the twos warring families? Is this the search for treasure? Is this the story of doomed lovers? It tries to tell a wide array of stories, only to fail to tell any of them entirely. You never fully care about any of the characters or their ultimate fates.

In the most successful spaghetti westerns, The Great Silence, the original Django, and The Man With No Name movies, there is a strong central character, and through that perspective, you learn what you need to about the world. That single consciousness filters the periphery. In A Fistful of Dollars we learn the plight of Marisol, but we learn it through Clint Eastwood’s character. His story is the primary concern, everything else is secondary, and you only learn about the rest as it relates to him. In Sukiyaki Western Django, however, each of these storylines is given equal weight, and the film suffers for it.

And for as many guns that fire in this movie, the result is surprisingly dull. I spent long sections of the film waiting for them to get on with it. The pacing is wildly uneven, and there is a lot of attention paid to things that don’t ever play a role of much importance.

So, this is a Japanese movie, in English. And I don’t mean that it is dubbed or subtitled. In a movie populated exclusively by Japanese actors (with one exception), everyone speaks English. It is really distracting, and at times off-putting. Some of the actors speak fluidly, but many of them sound like they are simply saying syllables, like they learned their lines phonetically. This leads to awkward, stumbling dialogue, and jarring moments that take away from the movie. Quentin Tarantino (when will people learn not to put him onscreen?) even does his lines in an accent, as if he was a natural Japanese speaker who learned to speak English. It is a really strange decision. Subtitles, or even dubbing, would work much better.

Sukiyaki Western Django seems like a good idea, but it isn’t. It doesn’t work as a spaghetti western, and it never quite gets to the level of frenetic chaos that it wants to achieve, which could have saved the movie. When I saw the guy with the lip ring and afro, and the mob of bad guys with dyed red bangs, I anticipated some seriously nutty shit. What I got instead was meh, M-E-H, meh.

Cop Out

I used to enjoy Kevin Smith movies, I really did. They were chocked full of foul-mouthed wise asses with enough of a bitter streak that I felt like we could be friends. Sadly, those days are fading into the rearview mirror. Zack and Miri Make a Porno had moments, but moments are not enough to carry a film career.

And now we have Cop Out, which kills any lingering interest I still had in watching a Kevin Smith movie. Granted, it might not be entirely his fault. I don’t think the script gave him much to work with, and I walked away feeling like maybe he owed money to screenwriters Mark and Robb Cullen (who’s career highlight reel includes episodes of Las Vegas and Gary the Rat), or maybe they pulled his near lifeless corpse out of a freezing river and he directed their movie to repay some sort of life debt.

Cop Out really is a waste. There are so many reasons why it could work. First and foremost, Bruce fucking Willis. Right there you have my attention. Tracy Morgan can be funny. I even like Sean William Scott, based solely on The Rundown, which is awesome. But there is nothing to redeem this movie.

Willis and Morgan play Jimmy Monroe and Paul Hodges, cops who, despite having been partners for nine years, spend most of the movie acting like they just met each other. They don’t play by the rules of the stuffy old police department, and get suspended without pay for a month. Now Jimmy can’t afford to pay for his daughter’s $48000 wedding. Does a New York cop really make enough money that one months salary will cover that? He has to sell his prized possession, an $80000 baseball card, or else his ex-wife’s smarmy new husband (Jason Lee) will pay for the wedding and Jimmy will look like jerk.

But all does not go smoothly. Before Jimmy can sell his card it is stolen and, through a needlessly complicated series of events, winds up in the hands of a baseball memorabilia collector/drug kingpin of Brooklyn, Poh Boy (Guillermo Diaz). If you couldn’t tell Poh Boy means business from his sinister sounding nickname, the dollar sign on the back of his hand should tell you. I think it is supposed to be a tattoo, but it looks like they drew it on with Sharpie. As a matter fact, every tattoo in the movie looks like they drew it on.

Somehow Cop Out is almost two hours long. I don’t know why. There is so much that should have wound up on the cutting room floor. The subplot with Sean William Scott, the most inept parkour practitioner in the entire world, is only there so he can tell knock-knock jokes and repeat everything that Paul says. Seriously, it’s like watching a retarded man argue with a parrot. Kevin Pollack (Usual Suspects) and Adam Brody (The OC) play boot-obsessed, by-the-book cops with a vendetta against Jimmy and Paul. Paul is consumed with the idea that his wife, Debbie (Rashida Jones), is cheating on him, and mostly you just feel bad for her because her husband is such a complete turd. There is also a girl in a trunk of a stolen car. Most of this should be hacked out of movie with a fucking machete. It wouldn’t make Cop Out good, but it would make it mercifully shorter.

I like dick and fart jokes. I’m a sucker for crude, juvenile humor. I find poop, urine, and boners endlessly hilarious. Cop Out tries to employ this kind of comedy, only to fail miserably. This just goes to show that even dumb, sophomoric humor, isn’t easy to pull off, because they fuck it up on a grand scale. The only person laughing in the theater was a fifteen-year-old kid there with his mom. And even he didn’t laugh that much.

You can tell the writers thought they were being super-duper funny and clever. You can almost see them sitting around going, “Hey, you know what would be super funny, guys? There’s a car thief, and it turns out to be a ten-year-old kid. Boo-Yah!” You know what? They were wrong, dead fucking wrong.

The banter between Willis and Morgan is forced, and during the first scene where Paul interrogates a drug suspect using only lines from other movies, they feel the need to pause between each quote and tell the audience what movie it came from. Do Smith and the Cullen boys really think that no one else saw Scarface or Training Day? It feels like they’re talking down to the viewers, like they don’t have enough faith in movie fans to get a reference.

It is obvious that the filmmakers wanted Cop Out to be an homage to movies like 48 Hours and Beverly Hills Cop. They even got Harold Faltermeyer (Tango & Cash, Top Gun, and The Running Man) to lend his signature synthesized scoring abilities to the movie.

Here is a list of important lessons we’ve learned from Cop Out. Just because you’ve seen a lot of movies, and you make your stoner buddies laugh, doesn’t mean you should write a movie. Bruce Willis, though he may be a god among men, shouldn’t do comedy. Tracey Morgan is only funny in small doses as a supporting character. (Cop Out actually feels like one of his make believe movies from 30 Rock, and I wondered for a while if the filmmakers originally intended to do something like make a fake trailer for one of those movies and somehow took this steaming shit instead.)

Cop Out simply doesn’t work, on any level. Every aspect of this movie is like fingernails on a chalkboard, a gloriously unfunny chalkboard.

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

There are reasons why Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans shouldn’t work. Chief among these is that the story is completely played out. Corrupt cop, running amok, playing by his own flawed rules as his life unravels around him. You’ve heard it all before, and in less capable hands, this would be a completely forgettable movie. Lucky for everyone that Werner Herzog doesn’t like to make forgettable movies.

Nicholas Cage plays Terence McDonagh, the titular Lieutenant. While rescuing a prisoner about to drown in his cell during Hurricane Katrina, McDonagh injures his back, an injury that the doctor tells him will likely plague him and cause him pain for the rest of his life. Bummer, but apparently the doctor’s solution is to give him an eternal prescription for Vicodin. This propels McDonagh down a dark path of drugs and debauchery. Before you know it, he’s shaking down johns of his hooker girlfriend, Frankie (Eva Mendes), smoking crack and banging club girls in parking lots, and racking up huge gambling debts with his bookey, Ned (Brad Dourif). It is a slippery slope indeed. But McDonagh, unlike many of his cinematic counterparts, doesn’t try to scrabble his way out of the hole and fail, he gleefully digs himself deeper and deeper into the chaos and madness of underground New Orleans.

In the midst of his freefall, McDonagh still manages to be a devoted cop, coping with the post-apocalyptic mayhem that immediately followed Katrina. A Senegalese drug dealer and his family are murdered execution style, and he is in charge of the investigation.

Left alone, the story wouldn’t do much. But screenwriter William Finkelstein (Cop Rock, yes, I said motherfucking Cop Rock!!!) populates his script with quirky background characters, roles that Herzog fills, in his usual style, with an assortment of twitchy misfits. Xzibit plays drug dealer with dreams of expanding into real estate. Fairuza Balk does a turn as a slutty traffic cop that McDonagh tries to enlist in his unending quest for pharmecuticals. Tom Bower and Jennifer Coolidge play his almost adorably alcoholic father and stepmother, who on a different level and with different substances, struggle with the same demons as McDonagh. Val Kilmer is his equally, though differently, corrupt partner, and does so with an accent that seems so removed from his person that I was almost convinced someone else was doing the voice. This idiosyncratic collection of individuals adds a much needed texture to the movie.

Above all of these characters, Cage stands out. This is a difficult sentence for me to type since I generally hate pretty much everything he’s done for the last 15 years except Con Air. But he plays McDonagh like a delirious, manic, cracked out Jimmy Stewart with a revolver stuffed down the front of his pants. His performance harkens back to some of his earlier, riskier, roles. He’s emaciated and pasty, sweating like he has a severe case of Dengue fever, with a bad haircut. His performance toes the line of being too much, and he risks boiling over into caricature, but he reins it in before it goes too far. Herzog gives Cage ample room to play with in the confines of drug induced bedlam of McDonagh’s mind, my favorite being a paranoid stare down with a pair of iguanas that Val Kilmer insists are not iguanas, and may not be there at all.

When I first saw a trailer about this movie, I dismissed it completely. I assumed that it was going to be some pedestrian film about a corrupt cop that only wanted to capitalize on the success of something that came before. Apparently Herzog lobbied for a name change, and there is no connection to the 1992 Harvey Keitel Bad Lieutenant. Regardless of the title, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans twists and tweaks the formula and characters just enough to a make a move that is interesting and worth watching.

Ong Bak 2

Ong Bak 2: The Beginning should not be confused with Tom yum goong, which was released theatrically in the US as The Protector, but has appeared in a number of questionably legal places mislabeled as Ong Bak 2.

The real Ong Bak 2 begins in the year 1431 AD, a time of strife and siege in the history of Thailand. The countryside is full of warlords, bands of outlaws, and political upheaval. There are mystics, treachery, royal courts, and all of the fun stuff that goes accompanies a feudal society.

This is the story of Tien, the son of a high-ranking member of the military. When he is a young boy his parents are betrayed and murdered, and he is captured by tough looking slave traders with facial tattoos. Instead of waiting passively to be sold, Tien clubs the main bad guy in the face with a rock, and his captors decide to soak him in blood and toss him into a mud pit to fight an angry crocodile for sport. Tien is feisty for a boy from a privileged family, especially one who was taught to dance instead of fight, and he kills the croc. While he is locked in a life and death struggle with the aforementioned angry reptile, the slave traders are taken out by another band of outlaw raiders.

The leader of the new outlaws, Chernung (Sorapong Chatree), takes a liking to the plucky underdog, Tien, and takes him under his wing. Over a period of years the boy trains in a wide variety of weapons and martial arts, including Muay Thai, Karate, Kung Fu, Silat, and a little Jiu Jitsu thrown in for good measure. There is even a scene that tips its cap to Jackie Chan’s turn in the Drunken Master series.

Of course when young Tien grows up he turns out to be none other than Tony Jaa, who on this particular feature film is credited at star, co-director, martial arts choreographer, and action director, among others. After passing a number of physical and mental tests, Tien replaces his mentor, Chernung, as head outlaw.

Whereas Ong Bak was pretty much a hey-world-look-at-me stunt reel for Jaa, Ong Bak 2 focuses more on the story. Which is really too bad, since that is where problems arise. The story itself is fine, though you’ve seen it many times before in every single Kung Fu movie ever made. The trouble lies in the way the story is told. Is this going to be a revenge story, a story of redemption, or is he going to reconnect with his lost love, Pim (Primorata Dejudom)? There are a number of directions the narrative could go, but it never really goes anywhere. An hour into the film there is still no discernable path.

Much of the story is told through flashbacks, you jump into Tien’s memories at random, and the structure feels forced. It would flow much smoother in the story was simply told in a linear fashion from the first events to the last.

As it is, the plot is jumbled and difficult to follow at times. I’m not sure who is on who’s side, who is betraying who, and where alliances lie. Perhaps this is due to my woeful lack of knowledge about the history of Thailand, perhaps not.

That is one issue. Another is that Tien never has a concrete goal or story arc. Again, it seems like he could go in a number of ways, but he never goes anywhere. The filmmakers try to do too much in a 98-minute movie, and instead accomplish too little. There is no antagonist. There are a number of possibilities, but no one steps forward and takes over. This overall lack of focus detracts from the film and drags it down.

While the story leaves something to be desired, the action is top notch. The fight scenes are intricately choreographed, and are sure to please fans of the first movie. While Muay Thai takes center stage in Ong Bak, Ong Bak 2 features a wide variety of martial arts. The filmmakers want to embody all of the martial forms in one person, Tien. It also features something else the first film didn’t, weapons. It turns out that Jaa is just as adept with a sword as he is with his elbows, knees, and fists. There is a scene where Jaa runs on top of a herd of elephants that is reminiscent of the car surfing scenes in Teen Wolf, and the climactic battle is exactly what fans of this genre want. (Seriously, it’s more than twenty minutes long.).

In a period piece it is vital that the details not take you out of the movie, and in that regard the film looks great. It is full of elaborate set pieces and costumes, and beautiful scenery. As I said, I don’t have much knowledge of Thai history, so I don’t know how spot on the details actually are, but they certainly convinced me enough to keep watching. No one in the background is mistakenly wearing a digital watch in this movie. They even got the teeth right. One of the most distracting things I can think of is watching a western, a post-apocalyptic movie, or maybe a film about a 15^th century band of Thai outlaws, where everyone has a mouthful of gleaming, perfectly white, capped teeth.

Ong Bak 2 is worth watching if you’re a fan or martial arts films, especially of Tony Jaa, but it doesn’t hold a candle to the original or Tom yum goong, and prepare to be bogged down in a story that is never fully realized.

The US DVD release comes with an extra disc of special features. There is an alternate cut of the movie that has a few subtle differences. This version is called Ong Bak 2: Birth of the Dragon, there is a slight variation in structure, it is 15 minutes shorter, and there is a Thai hip-hop song over the end credits.

There is a trio of short production documentaries that are worth watching. They provide some helpful historical context for the story, and even some plot elements and information that should have been in the actual film. Apparently there was some sort of prophecy when Tien was born that said he should stay away from weapons or his life would go down the tubes. This seems like a small point, but would have added a lot to his character, and clarified some glaring questions in the plot.

And make sure that if you do watch Ong Bak 2, watch it with the subtitles. This goes without saying most of the time, but the voices they picked to do the dubbing work on this one are a little too ridiculous.

2 Fast 2 Furious

When I watched The Fast and the Furious it took well over four hours to finish a movie that is only 106 minutes long. I’ve sat like sentinel through movies like Surf Nazis Must Die, Black Devil Doll From Hell, and countless other highly questionable films, but watching more than ten consecutive minutes of The Fast and the Furious was too painful to take, even for me.

So of course they made a sequel, 2003’s 2 Fast 2 Furious. (Actually they’ve made three sequels, so far.) You can tell it is going to be cool because they use the number 2 instead of the word Too.

Director John Singleton (Boyz n the Hood) and writers Michael Brandt and Derek Haas (who scribbled the updated 3:10 to Yuma and the A-Team remake) manage to avoid some of the pitfalls of the original, like bad writing, worse acting, and an idiotic story. How they get around these traps is really a stroke of genius, they just don’t include any of them in the movie.

No one goes to see 2 Fast 2 Furious for story or characters or any of those things most films rely on. No, people go to see movies like this to see cool cars drive fast. That’s it. The driving beat of the soundtrack, hunky studs, and girls in bikinis are just icing on the cake, but the cars take center stage.

2 Fast 2 Furious starts out with a car race (imagine that) that is essentially live-action anime. The camera zooms in and around what look like computer generated Matchbox cars, bright lights flash as the Miami cityscape flashes past, and one character even yells out, “Smack that ass,” as she jumps her pink convertible over a drawbridge. The scene is just absurd enough to be a lot of fun. Too bad the rest of the movie never lives up to this potential.

Paul Walker reprises his role as Brian O’Connor, now a disgraced cop, living underground in Miami, where he earns a living as the baddest street racer in town. But the FBI and US Customs need his help, since no one else can drive like him. He teams up with estranged childhood friend, Roman Pearce (Tyrese Gibson, reteaming with Baby Boy director Singleton), and sexy undercover Customs agent Monica Fuentes (Eva Mendes), in order to take down the infamous, hard to catch, drug kingpin, Carter Verone (Cole Hauser, a natural redhead who looks really weird with his hair dyed black).

After the promise of the initial scene, the movie devolves into an action movie cliché. There are the stock vicious bad guy, corrupt cop, and even a federal agent who doesn’t like the way these renegades make up their own rules as they go along. As you can imagine, he is against this whole damn thing and spends most of his screen time scowling.

Thankfully there is not much of a script, which leads to mercifully few attempts at actual acting, since none of the cast is particularly skilled at doing anything but look pretty. The less opportunities for these actors to prove they can’t act, the better. And of the script that is there, every third line is, “I got you.” Seriously, you could make a drinking game out of it and be pretty wasted by the end. But like I said, there isn’t a lot of time wasted on things like story and character. Here the elements of film serve one purpose, and that purpose is to get to the chase scenes as quickly as possible.

Too bad that none of the action sequences are nearly as much fun as the first one, and the movie becomes boring and hackneyed, though admittedly more watchable than the first. Instead of spending ninety minutes watching all of 2 Fast 2 Furious, watch the first scene, try not to have a seizure, turn the movie off, and go on about your business.

Mostly this movie made me want to watch a movie like Bullit, The French Connection, or Two-Lane Blacktop, something that not only has great car chases, but also things like story.