In the Flesh: 2 Fast 2 Furious (Patreon)

It’s remarkable that even with the removal of Vin Diesel and the doubling down on Paul Walker’s unwatchable performance as now-disgraced cop Brian Spilner, 2 Fast 2 Furious somehow comfortably outstrips its predecessor, which is to say it’s merely dumb and bad instead of gruelingly stupid. This time it’s Tyrese Gibson shouldering the burden of getting us to the finish line. As hotheaded driver Roman Pearce, Gibson is all dazzling smile and effortless charisma, a dynamo in his own right and lightning in a bottle next to Walker’s borderline inanimate screen presence. Thom Barry returns as FBI agent Bilkins, whose delightfully deadpan one-liners are probably the best-delivered lines in the movie, but 2 Fast’s secret weapon is Cole Hauser’s Carter Verone, a cartel-linked drug dealer attempting to smuggle his vast stockpiles of cash out of the US and into South America.

It’s not that Verone is a villain for the ages, or that Hauser is breaking the mold in his exploration of the role, it’s just that he’s making little choices to more fully texture the character and that kind of professionalism stands out in such a leaden cast. He sucks his teeth, subtly modulates his facial expressions, adjusts the way he stands and speaks depending on to whom he’s speaking; it’s not Giancarlo Esposito as Gus Fring or anything, but it’s a thoughtful little performance. His cheapness and pettiness are smart little details as well. Parts of 2 Fast’s much re-written script show signs of a sharper writer or writers than others, as when the crooked cop played by Mark Boone Junior unexpectedly goes straight at the risk of his own life and the lives of his family, or when Verone unleashes a fleet of duplicate cars to confuse his police pursuers as to the location of his drug money.

For all that the film occasionally shows a flash of, if not intelligence, at least some sort of animal cunning about what might be fun to look at or watch, it is fundamentally stupid. Like Rob Cohen’s first installment it has no idea how to convey a sense of speed, and director John Singleton’s visual instincts are, if anything, worse. The silly spy gadgets are back as well, distractingly fake-looking and transparently invented to paper over holes in the script. Nothing in the film’s aesthetic surpasses the already pitifully low bar set by the original, and very little so much as equals it. It’s an uglier movie than The Fast and the Furious, its title screen reaching far enough and failing hard enough to qualify as a minor audiovisual abomination, but a little smarter and a little more fun.