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'2 Fast 2 Furious' 2 boring

Published 10:00 pm, Thursday, June 5, 2003
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The 2001 crunch-a-thon, "The Fast and the Furious," cleverly repackaged all the cliches and conventions of the '50s teenage hot-rod movie and came up with a surprise box-office and critical hit that launched the careers of Vin Diesel and (to a lesser extent) Paul Walker.

The $100 million-plus sequel, "2 Fast 2 Furious," plays like an unusually bad, overblown episode of "Miami Vice," and has virtually none of the pleasures of the original. It's the worst sequel to a pretty good movie since last summer's "Men in Black II."

There's a handful of daring stunts and the scale has been jacked way up (so in the climax we see 200 cars instead of 20) but there's nothing new or captivating and it's hard to imagine anyone sitting through it but small boys juiced by the numbing, video-game action.

It starts off with a -- by my watch (and the fact that I was looking at my watch should tell you something) -- 20-minute, impromptu drag race through a Miami that somehow has been as cleared of vehicles and pedestrians as the streets of Monaco during the Grand Prix.

After that, there's a series of contrivances that has the Walker character, who has since left the L.A.P.D. undercover-cop business, impressed into a government campaign to bust a drug lord (Cole Hauser) and teamed up with his estranged childhood buddy (Tyrese).

There's more mayhem on the freeway, some macho posturing by the stars as they compete for a sexy co-undercover agent (Eva Mendes), a torture scene involving a man being disemboweled by a rat, that inevitable climactic demolition derby and then it's mercifully over.

Walker is the only returning cast member from the original and he's actually aging well. His steely blue eyes have become more magnetic with confidence, and like Keanu Reeves, he's learned that lowering his voice to a Clint Eastwood-level can offset the handicap of pretty-boy looks.

Tyrese, who is better known as a male model and music star, brings little to the table. His delivery is so close to Martin Lawrence that he's probably open to a lawsuit, he tries much too hard in every scene, and his overwhelming vanity is not a bit cute: it's irritating.

The director is John Singleton, who was the youngest-ever best-director Oscar nominee for 1991's "Boyz N the Hood" and hasn't done anything interesting since. Unlike original director Rob Cohen, he has no gift for giddy action and his movie is a crashing bore.