The Fast and the Furious: Critic Reviews

Could you keep the noise down a touch, Vin? You're going to wake up the audience.

While few of the paper-thin characters register long enough to make much of an impression, Diesel carries the movie with his unsettling mix of Zen-like tranquillity and barely controlled rage.

A gritty and gratifying cheap thrill, Rob Cohen's high-octane hot-car meller is a true rarity these days, a really good exploitationer, the sort of thing that would rule at drive-ins if they still existed.

This is a bad, bad movie. Skip it.

Sure it's a guilty pleasure watching stunt drivers put flashy state-of-the-art streetcars through impossibly daring maneuvers, but it's a happy indulgence nonetheless.

... when characters are not racing at breakneck speed, the movie as a whole ceases to move.

It's all testosterone and swagger, and tries so hard to be cool that it's just the opposite.

Not Point Break so much as Point Less.

An exciting second-tier action flick.

It runs out of gas.

This is probably the most fun to be had at the multiplex so far this year.

From first frame to last, this is an unabashedly B-Picture, elevated by A-level stunts but dragged down to C-level characterizations.

Returning the series to solid ground after 2 Fast 2 Furious leaned too heavily on cartoonish CGI effects, Tokyo Drift relies on old-fashioned stunt work that gives its best sequences a sense of brute physicality.

...ultimately entertaining enough to warrant a mild recommendation...

It doesn't matter that we know where it's going, what counts is that Cohen keeps his pedal to the floor and that his actors gun their lines with absolute conviction. Loud cars, fast music: this movie knows exactly what it's about.

At first it's an exhilarating ride with original action scenes that quickly become routine when they are thrown at the audience over and over.

A film that stays true to what it tries to be.

Visually striking thriller.

The plot gets ridiculous as it's slowly revealed that one of them isn't what they seem to be at first, and continues to get more preposterous, but with better car crashes!

What is unforgivable is that many of the racing scenes were boring too.

It's dumb as a post, sure, but man, does it get your heart pounding and the adrenaline racing through your bloodstream.

Though it might as well be called The Dopey and the Deafening, this is the kind of overblown junk food that summer flicks are all about.

A plot that could be written on the back of a pine tree car freshener.

Pretty cars, Pretty people, Pretty lame, and Pretty long . . . It isn't all that furious, and it certainly doesn't go by fast enough

Walker's characterization is like a brick wall at the end of the quarter mile, bringing credibility to a dead and deadly stop every time he opens his mouth.