It’s been eight long years since the first giddy frames of The Fast and the Furious. And now here we are, all back together again
Some movie are watersheds – films that bring fresh new faces to light, personalities that define the hext generation of actors.
It's been eight long years since the first giddy frames of The Fast and the Furious. And now here we are, all back together again
Not that the four major players in this crash-and-burn classics haven't been working. They've all made at least half a dozen movies in the last eight years, and they all have things planned for the future. But world-shaking projects? Realizations of their genius, first glimpsed in Too Fast? Not ... so much.
The most visible of course, is Vin Diesel. Vin had one cult hit before Too Fast, the Australian scifi-thriller Pitch Black, but since then? Well ... a not-very-good sequel to PB, a couple of mold-breakers in A Man Apart and Find Me Guilty, neither of which made much money. The howlingly bad The Pacifier, Vin's tribute to Schwarzengger's Kindergarten Cop, and the entirely forgettable Babylon A.D. The only movie that came close to making any mark at all was xXx, made immediately after Too Fast, and even there it didn't quite catch: Diesel refused to make any sequels to what could have been a halfway-decent action franchise, which has now been driven into the ground by a truly awful sequel starring Ice Tea.
(Vin does have one thing going for him, though: some of the coolest character names ever. Domnic Toretto. Xander Cage. Shane Wolf. And even two one-word names: Riddick and -- my personal favorite, from Babylon -- Toorop. How true.)
Paul Walker hasn't even been that lucky. Most of his movies disappeared immediately and without a trace: Timeline (2003), Noel (2004), Running Scared\ (2006) The Death and Life of Bobby Z (2007), and The Lazarus Project.(2008) And even the couple of highly physical thriller/adventures, Into the Blue and Eight Below, couldn't catch a break. Fast & Furious is actually the biggest picture he's had since ... well, since The Fast and the Furious. (And he's only had one cool name, this one from Running Scared: Joey Gazelle. Yahhh.) 8 movies
Jordana Brewster has made the fewest of the quartet, and the most forgettable. You got your D.E.B.S. (2004), Nearing Grace (2005), and Annapolis (2006), and there are probably more people in your carpool than saw those films combined. She did play Chrissi in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, but I dare you to remember which one Chrissi was. And then Jordana made a break for TV, where she made a pilot for a series based on Mrs. And Mrs. Smith -- it didn't get picked up -- and did a four-episode turn on NBC's Chuck, as his college-girlfriend-turned-spy. Charming as ever, just not ... very ... lucky.
Michelle Rodriguez has been the busiest, I think, doing a ton of video game voice work (as has Vin), and staying close to her action-adventure roots, in film and on TV. She's actually got a couple of cult classics to her name, including the first Resident Evil (in which she dies, damn it) and the first Bloodrayne (in which she doesn't make the sequel, double dammit). And though she was perfectly good in Blue Crush, Control, Bloodrayne, and The Breed, her last couple of choices -- Battle in Seattle and Gardens of the Night -- are essentially missing in action (so to speak). She has, however, managed to stay visible by being one of the more treacherous (and mysterious) Tailies in Lost. And when she got shot? Oh, we cried.
But here we are, back for one more round of fast drivin', hot-talking boys and babes screeching and skiddiin' all around the town. We'll see. We'd like to be positive, but the fact is the studio hasn't released any copies for review prior to the Friday, April 3rd debut ... and that is almost never a good sign.
