Fast and Furious: Scene 1

Posted by Casanova Frankenstein.

This is a novelization of the first part of the film, Fast and Furious, or as you may think of it, The Fast and The Furious 4: Running Out of Names. This won't really spoil the movie if you were planning on watching it, but I wouldn't care even if it did, because this movie sucks, and I knew that from the very first scene.

We start out in the Dominican Republic. Vin Diesel was forced to flee the country as a fugitive at the end of the first movie, and has accrued a new gang of criminals because he still hasn't learned his lesson. Maybe his character will learn in this movie that crime doesn't pay? I'll let you watch and learn that for yourselves (but he doesn't).

The camera tracks along a gasoline truck, slowly revealing that it's dragging five tankers behind the cab. This is the point where I knew this movie was going to be gratuitously over the top, and it was in the first fifty seconds. In the otherwise abandoned road, three vehicles quickly approach the truck: a black muscle car, piloted by our protagonist, and co-piloted by his girlfriend Michelle Rodriguez; and two tow trucks, piloted by Vin Diesel's loyal gang members.

Michelle Rodriguez crawls onto the hood of the car, which at this point is tailgating the five-trailer-long tanker, and jumps onto the last one, carrying a scuba tank on her back. Vin Diesel navigates the muscle car next to the truck, which, incidentally, puts him right into oncoming traffic. Michelle Rodriguez shimmies her way to the hook-up between the fourth and final trailers, and sprays it with liquid nitrogen (or something) from the scuba tank. During this time, one of the tow trucks has skidded a 180 and is now going in reverse, in the same direction as the tanker and tailgating behind it. The tow truck's passenger climbs out the back window onto the bed and hoists a tow hook onto the back of the tanker.

Obviously, all these vehicles are modified to have more than one reverse gear.

So when Michelle Rodriguez strikes the frozen trailer hook-up with a hammer, it shatters, and the tow truck drives off dragging a complete and almost undamaged gasoline tanker. The driver of the tanker feels something and turns away from the magazine he was reading while driving on the job and searches his side view mirrors to find nothing out of the ordinary. Then he says something in Spanish to his pet iguana in the passenger seat and goes on reading his magazine.

The gang has one more tow truck and Michelle Rodriguez starts going into position to steal another tanker. As she's walking across the roof of the tanker, there is a gentle bend in the road and the driver of the tanker is at an angle to see her, and realizes that someone is jacking his load. He quickly swerves into the other lane, smashing into Vin Diesel's muscle car. During this obscenely dangerous maneuver, Michelle Rodriguez drops her hammer, but the second tow truck has hooked up to the tanker, and can't come undone. The driver of the tanker is still on the offensive, retrieves his revolver from the glove box, and fires a couple shots in Vin Diesel's direction. Vin Diesel drifts back, out of the line of sight, and tell Michelle Rodriguez to spray the hook-up, even though she doesn't have a hammer. She sprays it and now has to jump onto the muscle car, all amid the gunshots still being fired at them. She makes it somehow and Vin Diesel skids the rear of his car around the front and continues to throw it into the joint of the trailer, breaking it free and allowing his comrade to drive off with it. The driver of the tanker now finally notices the downhill stretch of road leading to a sharp turn, and past that sharp turn is a cliff. He decides not to apply any brakes, but instead grabs his pet iguana and jumps out of the cab, which is still going at freeway speeds. Allegedly he survives and leaves the tanker going out of control towards a cliff, because it's not bad enough that he lost two tankers to criminals, he decides the best course of action would be to hurl the remaining three tankers that he does have off a mountain.

Well, the tanker veers into the adjacent cliff side and skids around out of control, contorting itself to pieces and eventually leaving Vin Diesel in his muscle car, at a complete stop in front of one tanker at the cliff's edge, and with another violently rolling and bouncing his direction, on fire I might add. Vin Diesel calmly and expertly revs the engine, spinning out the back tires and, at just the right moment, lets it loose and just barely makes it under the the bouncing tanker, narrowly dodging impending death. The camera pans out and moves to the next stupid scene.

What are some things wrong with this opening? Firstly, big vehicles are designed to carry large weights, but five gasoline trailers is way beyond the capacity of any semi. Secondly, any driver brave enough to take the job would pay more attention to the road, and off his leisure reading, as it would take him about three miles to come to a complete stop. Thirdly, a driver would have no need for a gun, there's no way he would be held responsible for the stolen gas. I would just let them take it and go one with three tankers, since he ended up losing it all anyway. With the heist, their plan is highly dependent on people working well on top of moving vehicles. If anyone had fallen off, the whole operation would be ruined, and also someone would die. It's unreasonable to expect a 150lb woman to navigate those kinds of conditions with a scuba tank on her back. It's also unreasonable to think that a small tow truck could be modified to do the stunts portrayed and still be able to tow, and tow something way bigger than it's designed to at that. I'll stop here, and leave one final remark that physics doesn't really work the way that it seems to work in the movie.

So basically, it's a movie, of course it's stupid. It's a Fast and the Furious movie, too, so of course it's really stupid. Now that I think about it, I don't know what I was thinking. This whole write up was a waste of time.