Fast & Furious Reviews
Top Critic
Though I admit the title of the film is slightly dumb, I can't really fault much else going on here.
Full Review
| Original Score: B
Turn off your mind, though, and there's some fun to be had from some of the better whizz-bang sequences.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/6
This is a movie about street racers... criminals in fact, and there was nothing grimy or dirty about it at all.
The stars look bored out of their minds when the fourth episode of the franchise stalls between racing sequences, which is all too often in a flick where 106 minutes speed by in what feels like at least four hours.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/4
People who want nothing more out of a movie than an extended rap video -- there's lots of hip-hop, close-ups of cars, and women in shiny tiny shorts -- may be satisfied. But this movie isn't much more than a re-do of the first film in the series.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
The end result, while it provides moments of kinetic entertainment, is too repetitive and uneven to be satisfying.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Fast & Furious spends a lot of time advertising how exciting it is, without actually being exciting.
Aside from the opening sequence, there's nothing imaginative about it, and the actual filming is routine shaky-quick-cut stuff.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Boiled down to its essentials, F&F is four pretty swell auto-race video games encased in the bloated carcass of a script, by Chris Morgan, that must have been researched in the Archive of Movie Cliches.
It's time for these car fiends to slam the heap into 'park.' Diesel should use his ESP powers to find a better gig with a franchise that still has some gas -- such as maybe The Pacifier 2?
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
This example of presummer pop diversion will be best appreciated by future audiences flabbergasted by its unabashed revelry in fossil-fuel consumption.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/5
The reunion is fun and frantic, like the original on double nitro.
The good news is that the movie's speedy and strong enough to deliver some well-tuned excitement, even if it's as bulky and brainlessly bright as the muscle cars it celebrates.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
A strange piece of nostalgia, where, without apology, fast cars still rule and fuel is burned with abandon.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Like Brian and Dom, Fast & Furious would benefit from more female company. And Vin Diesel's mumbling sulk gets to be a drag after a while.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
The stars are back in the fourth installment of this fast-cars/hot-chicks series, which tells you a little something about the rocky roads their careers have traveled since 2001's original film.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
Feels about as fresh and lively as a piece of burnt rubber.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
Director Justin Lin still hasn't learned film geography. Even the kinetic tunnel races, meant to nitrocharge the movie, fall flat from spatial incoherence. You barely know what's happening, and to whom.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Everything that happens here happened in the three previous chapters -- and in Cannonball Run, for that matter.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/4
Even the most mundane lives occasionally sparkle with moments of exhilaration, and so does Moscow, Belgium.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Like a lemon that's been tricked out with a fancy paint job, Fast & Furious won't stand up to much scrutiny under the hood.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
By the fourth installment of the franchise, Fast & Furious has shed two articles from its title, regained the four original lead actors, and turned shamelessly into a monotonous unofficial edition of the Grand Theft Auto gaming series.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Fast & Furious succeeds because the action is supercharged in a style that recalls Mel Gibson's apocalyptic classic, The Road Warrior. The characters are more than cartoonish, and the plot grips the road.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
All four films feature terrific stunts. But Fast & Furious is the first film since the original to be smart about how far to stretch logic without sacrificing the desired macho swagger and revved-up emotions.
Diesel is still charismatic thug Dominic Toretto, Walker is still determined cop Brian O'Conner, and the story is still dumb.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
This means many loud racing sequences (ably directed by Justin Lin) that look like the very video games inspired by these movies: candy-colored automobiles, digital dashboards and automated female voices.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Fast & Furious is exactly and precisely what you'd expect. Nothing more, unfortunately.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
In the jammed landscape of mass-market new releases, it offers an attractive getaway route from self-importance, snark, and chatty comedies about male bonding. Here, stick shifts do the talking.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
A tepid, repetitive and digitally augmented hot cars-hot women thriller that might probably won't give Vin Diesel and Paul Walker the career boost that The Fast and the Furious did.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Fast & Furious reconfirms that car-chase movies -- good, bad, or mediocre -- all assume the future employment of the quaint old fast-forward button.
Noise, noise, noise. Crunched metal and shattered glass. More noise. Revving engines. Vin Diesel's giant head. Hot chicks in tight miniskirts. Even more noise. The end.
