2 Fast 2 Furious (DVD-Video)
Picture:
B Sound: B Extras: B- Film: C-
Once upon
a time, two films were scheduled to go head to head against each other. There was fallen action director Renny
Harlin’s Driven and Rob Cohen’s The Fast and the Furious, both
2001. Harlin’s film was the big budget
hoped-for comeback that tried to revive both Harlin and star Sylvester
Stallone’s career. They even cast recent
comeback guy Burt Reynolds in the key supporting role. Unfortunately, that was the same waste of
talent Tony Scott’s Days of Thunder
(1990) made of Robert Duvall. Cohen’s
film was thought at the time as being the cheaper, last minute throw-together
that Universal was making just to spite the competing Warner Bros.
release. Instead, Harlin racked up
another huge bomb and Cohen had a huge hit on his hands. That was even followed with XXX a year later, making him a big
commercial director, and a star out of unknown Vin Diesel.
Cohen and
Diesel bowed out to not repeat themselves, but co-star Paul Walker returned for
the sequel 2 Fast 2 Furious
(2003). Model Tyrese Gibson entered as a
new character and the director to take over was none other than John
Singleton. The question then became, did
Diesel and Cohen make a mistake, or would the second film be what critics
thought the first film would be? The
result was mixed. The film was a big
hit, but it died fast and was less effective than the mixed first film.
Since
Cohen was an action director and Singleton a once-promising filmmaker, could he
translate the intelligence of Boyz in
the Hood (1991) into something more than a predictable sequel. Thanks to the Michael Brandt/Derek Haas
screenplay in part, it was nothing to write home about. For starters, it overvalues and underwrites Walker’s character to the point of
laughability. All Gibson can do is strut
and have attitude, which never helps anyone trying to go form model to
actor. Even his Singleton debut in Baby Boy did not give him any more of
an edge than being thought of first by the director as new male co-lead.
The
acting is lame, their behavior is regressive, the dialogue is unconvincing at
any rate, and the story about undercover police and drugs is tired, tired,
tired. Its idea of the Gangster genre is
absurd, especially by Hip Hop standards, and the violence is insulting. When characters keep pointing guns at each
other, you know the script is bankrupt, though I wondered if the anger
registering on the actors’ faces was in their disgust that they were stuck in
this film? Though the previous film was
not too realistic, Cohen brought some edge on certain levels here and
there. Except for some throw-away racial
slurs, the film is a politically correct version of the first one, and that
flattens out any excitement the first one might have had. Singleton can add this to his disastrous
would-be Shaft (2000) revival, as
examples of selling out any credibility he brought during the Black New Wave
that made his career possible. Instead
of important or even innovative films about the African-American experience, we
get an MTV film about cars racing all over the streets without any street
credibility. Now, African-American
directors have the equal opportunity to make the same commercial garbage as white
ones. By the film being a hit, Singleton
sets a bad precedent suggesting his early films were not important or a very
temporary thing. Get the politics out of
your system, then turn your back for big bucks.
This is the worse message Hollywood; especially one with their worst
box office year in a decade (which cannot be blamed on video games or DVDs, but
really bad films) needs to send.
The
anamorphically enhanced 2.35 X 1 image was shot by Matthew F. Leonetti, A.S.C.,
and it offers every cliché and tired lighting situation we can think of since
the Action films of 1980s. The transfer
is clean, but oddly unimpressive for a film made less than a year ago. This is not demonstration quality, looking
worse when we get the really bad, pointless digital animation and images that
show Hollywood is either worried about videogame competition or trying
to compete against it in vein. Maybe the
quality had to be degraded in the majority live footage so the digital would
not look so bad. Seeing the D-VHS copy at
the time might have give us some clues even a 35mm print would not, but the
HD-DVD further shows the problems with those moments and how much worse they
have become since this DVD was first reviewed, while some shots are
improved. The result is an HD version on
par with this old disc. You can read
about the whole trilogy on HD-DVD elsewhere on this site.
D-
The 5.1
mix of the film is punchy and moves, which was a hallmark of the first film,
but this one is not as good. For one
thing, the mix on the first one was more music minded, like few other 5.1 mixes
I had heard. It also was not musical in
the way a Musical or typical MTV film was.
Second, the sound is only available here in Dolby Digital, making it a
classic case of why Dolby cannot compete against DTS. However, it has only aged so well and the
HD-DVD only offers a Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 that shows this standard DVD-Video
got the sound right in the first place.
This film
has very active and articulate bass with the rest of its sound. The Dolby mix cannot handle all that sound, so
it tries to stick the bass in the subwoofer too much, while dumping fullness in
the rest of the channels. The result is
a choppy mess that lacks smoothness to the trained ear, or to anyone who saw
this in a proper theatrical presentation.
The Hip Hop music particularly suffers and fans with their own street
credibility who love that genre will agree with the strongest likeliness.
Extras
include a commentary by Singleton that shows how oblivious he is to what is
happening, videogame-like options that fall short of an actual state-of-the-art
videogame, a trailer for the actual videogame tie-in that may set a record for
ad placements itself, the ironically titled deleted
scenes, an “inside” look at the film running about 10 minutes, outtakes
that were better than the film at 2:40 that shows the kinds of personality all
involved were holding back, a Mitsubishi customizing short, a stunts short, a
short on Hip Hop star Ludacris, a subtitle text segment dubbed the “antedotes”
section, the usual cast/crew bio/filmography section, and DVD-ROM links.
The
extras seem as much of a distraction as the film itself. Despite how well it did, I have yet to hear
any fan of the original say that this was better. When a sequel is a hit, those who like it
(whether they know better or not) always say it is better in their excitement
without thinking. Paul Walker’s starring
role in Richard Donner’s Michael Crichton adaptation of Timeline later in the year was a huge bomb; his presence no help at
all. 2 Fast 2 Furious is 2 tired, though any future DTS edition would
make a good sound demo.
- Nicholas Sheffo
