The Fast and the Furious Trilogy – Blu-ray Review

Just in time to coincide with the record-breaking opening BO of ‘09’s ‘Fast & Furious’ (which reteamed Diesel and Walker for the first since 2001), Universal hits the nitrous on an extras-packed Blu-ray collection of the first three pics that give fans plenty of high-def carsploitation action.

A collection that spans from 2001 to 2006, surprise summer hit ‘The Fast and the Furious’ solidified Vin Diesel as an action star (coming off of sci-fi sleeper hit ‘Pitch Black’) and offered up a surprisingly enjoyable slice of drive-in cheese. Diesel got a bit too big for his britches and left the franchise in Paul Walker’s less capable hands for the Miami-set sequel ‘2 Fast 2 Furious’ with Walker then jetting and ‘The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift’ getting a whole new cast.

Positioning a job at a car-parts store that Toretto trusts and slowly moving in on Toretto’s hottie sister Mia (Jordana Brewster), O’ Connor dives headfirst into the illegal street-racing scene of L.A. and eventually buys trust when saving Toretto from the cops when his other team-members made a run for it. A lot of ‘Bruh’ Point Break posturing later and O’ Connor gets a little too close to the Toretto family and has doubts that it’s them. He instead starts to put his sights on a wealthy Japanese streetracing sect that are rivals of Toretto. Without throwing out spoilers, I’m sure we all know where this film is heading but true to the source material, it’s not the destination but the ride. The narrative is, of course, wafer-thin and what little there is comes from a better movie. ‘The Fast and the Furious’ is entertainment stripped to its most basic core – car chases, fist fights, hotties, etc. That the name is cribbed from a ’55 Roger Corman film was no accident I’m sure. Diesel is at the top of his gravel-voiced game here and while Walker doesn’t quite impress here, he’s an okay Johnny Utah facsimile. And let’s face it, people that show up to ‘The Fast and the Furious’ expect one thing and that one thing shows up in spades. Director Rob Cohen, generally not known for coherent action (‘Stealth’, ‘XXX’ and ‘The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor’), manages to assemble some cool car chase sequences here that are complemented by CGI and not completely driven by it.

It’s certainly not ‘The Road Warrior’ but there’s still a lot of stunt work here, particularly in the tense climatic hijack sequence. Let’s just say you get your money’s worth with this first pic.

The Feds show their stuffy mugs again when two agents Markham (James Remar) and Bilkins (Thom Barry) want to bust a narcotics smuggling ring run by smooth-talking Carter Verone (Cole Hauser) and makes an offer to O’ Connor to go undercover. Already having a female agent in place, Monica Fuentes (Eva Mendes), who is undercover as Carter’s hoe, Brian agrees but has one condition – he wants to choose his own partner. This leads us to Barstow where an old pal Roman Pearce (Tyrese Gibbons) manages to engage in dusty destruction derby’s while also being on house arrest (his trailer is less then 100 yards from the track). They obviously parted on not so good terms but Roman begrudgingly agrees to partake in the undercover mission to get his record wiped clean. With the two winning an ‘audition’ race, they get taken into Verone’s criminal employ where they can team up with Monica to bring down Verone during a job delivering an unspecified package to the keys. What does this mean? It means a car chase, of course! And not a franchise to rest on its laurels, the somewhat realistic nature of the action from the first pic is all but a puff of exhaust smoke. Still using the undercover guise of the first pic, this time however, the rapport isn’t between cop & criminal but between bickering friends. The camaraderie between Walker and Tyrese Gibson is amiable enough and Tyrese is actually pretty funny in the movie - which gives this second installment a much more comedic sensibility than the first. It’s still not quite enough to make up the hefty hole in the pic left by Diesel’s absence.

Eva Mendes is perfectly cast as a smokin’ Latina customs agent and walking anime chick Devon Aoki always deserves some screen time while Ludacris carries his few scenes well and Cole Hauser does a commendably nasty job as the short-fuse drug lord. The action is now more over-the-top and comes across more in the mold of car-chases from ‘The Transporter’ franchise – make what you will of that. This is certainly more of the same, though, with a bit more humor and a less substantive feel overall but I imagine most fans of the first will walk away from this one entertained.

While this third pic manages to get even cheesier than the previous two, I actually kind of liked it better than ‘2 Fast 2 Furious’ because of Black’s more endearing lead and the new fish out of water setting of placing an Alabama boy in Tokyo. The third pic opens with ‘bama boy Sean Boswell (Lucas Black) apparently trying to get comfortable at a new school and making the mistake of talking to a blonde who is wearing a skirt so short she needs two haircuts to wear. This blonde, of course, is represented by the requisite bulky jock (the oldest brother from ‘Home Improvement’!) and the jock doesn’t take too kindly to this punk talking to his woman. This ends up in an old-school hot-rod racing challenge that Sean wins at the expense of a lot of property damage, himself included. In trouble with the cops, his mom can’t cope with him anymore and ships him off to Japan to live with his dad, stationed there through the military. It’s his last chance to avoid jail and his dad makes it abundantly clear that he has to stay out of trouble and most importantly away from a car. Soon comes the culture shock as Southern boy Sean is clearly out of his element at a Tokyo high school and seems none too pleased with a school-issued uniform and slippers (no shoes in class of course). It’s never really explained how he understands the Japanese teachers but whatever. It doesn’t take long for him to make a few friends, though, with the school scoundrel Twinkie (Bow Wow) giving him the tour. And wouldn’t you guess it? It appears the thing to do when you’re in a Tokyo high school is to drift race in closed-off parking garages. With souped-up cars in gaudy colors, races tear through the levels of a parking garage with ‘drifting’ being the key to success i.e. a combo of complicated steering and hand-brake maneuvering to drift around those tight corners.

With Twinkie introducing Sean to his first parking garage party, stubborn Sean doesn’t seem to learn and gets into more heat due to a girl. Neela (Nathalie Kelley) caught his eye at school but a conversation with her attracts the attention of her boyfriend D.K. (Brian Tee), a local bruiser and small-time hood who has an uncle in the yakuza. Sean talks big and gets himself involved in a race with a car provided by the amused Han (Sung Kang), a more contemplative hood who wants to see what the kid’s got. At first, he ain’t got much as he embarrasses himself in attempting to drift, killing Han’s car and losing badly to D.K. – all in all, a pretty crappy first day in Tokyo. It turns out that owing Han a car is a good thing as Han takes Sean under his wing and gives him a job and an opportunity to prove himself. Han, more interested in the game of it all, and not necessarily the money places a wager with D.K. over pink slips – Sean vs. one of D.K.’s boys. This results in several drift-training montages and Sean finally getting the hang of it but things turn serious when D.K.’s uncle (Sonny Chiba!) discovers that Han has been stealing from them. With D.K. going after Han in full-force, Sean has no choice but to make a final race wager – a wager posed to Sonny Chiba himself – that the loser has to leave town. This is goofy storytelling to be sure but at least we’re getting away from infiltration/undercover storylines. Director Justin Lin (‘Better Luck Tomorrow’) doesn’t seem ashamed of what kind of film he’s making and embraces the ridiculousness of it all. Lucas Black provides a solid leading man with a Southern drawl that’s about as intentionally as far from Tokyo as you can get, which gives his posturing against the various Japanese hoodlums a more interesting dynamic. Brian Tee, Sung Kang and legend Sonny Chiba do good supporting work although the inclusion of Bow Wow seems forced at best.

Predictable stuff but the action is handled well and the major car chase set pieces don’t skimp with a sequence through the busy streets of Tokyo and the climatic curvy, downhill final race being fairly rousing entertainment. Not high art, but decent-enough popcorn fare. All three films get 2.35:1 1080p encodes, the first a VC-1 and the two sequels AVC and all three look fantastic. A more muted LA setting in the first is the least impressive of the three with Miami and Tokyo virtually popping off the screen but there’s nothing wrong with the source material and the studio knows that the fast-action in all three will need to have some top-notch encoding. Detail and color is great in all three and only the first contains just the slightest detection of grain (inherent to source no doubt). An easy recommend for fans itching to make a high-def upgrade. With the video looking great, the audio goes to great length to match with Universal providing DTS-HD 5.1 lossless tracks on all three. These three films were made for expert sound mixing and these tracks don’t disappoint. With pounding soundtracks and the constant car races and action, these three pics will test out whatever surround system you happen to be sporting. All three pictures contain an exhaustive amount of extras with each film also getting Universal’s own HD-exclusive ‘U-Control’ feature that sports a variety of picture-in-picture and trivia/text information. The first pics starts off with an audio commentary from director Rob Cohen and say what you want about the guy’s films; he can sure talk up a good time.

New HD features include ‘Dom’s Charger’ which is a quick look at the Dodge Charger, ‘Quarter Mile At a Time’ which is a ten-minute gander at the world of real street-racing and ‘The Fast and the Furious Video Mash Up’ which is a mildly interesting interactive feature that allows users to edit different clips from the film, alter the music and what not. This could be fun if approached with the right mindset (i.e. really bored…). ‘The Making of the Fast and the Furious’ is the standard making-of and runs about 18 minutes with cast/crew interviews. About six minutes of ‘Deleted Scenes’, ‘Tricking Out A Hot Import Car’ which is twenty minutes of Playboy Playmate Dalene Kurtis and stunt guru Craig Lieberman offering up their, um, respective insight. ‘Multiple Camera Angle Stunt Sequence’ gives us different camera angles for some of the stunt work. ‘Movie Magic Interactive Special Effects’ gives us three scenes and how they look pre and post special effects work. ‘On Editing for the MPAA’ is a kind of cool but short look at what Cohen and editor Peter Honess had to do to achieve the film’s PG-13 rating. A ‘Visual Effects Montage’ is another featurette showing us some footage with and without added f/x, ‘Paul Walker Public Service Announcement’ is Walker advising us to drive safely (geewillikers, thanks Paul!), three music videos, a sneak peek at ‘2 Fast 2 Furious and high-def theatrical trailers. The U-control feature has two events, the first being ‘Tech Specs’ which give all the stats on the various vehicles and various other info like insurance damage and the second event is the standard picture-in-picture with behind-the-scenes footage and cast/crew interviews. The disc is also BD-Live enabled where you can share your created Video Mash-Up with friends.With ‘2 Fast 2 Furious’, we start off with an audio commentary from director John Singleton who does a pretty good job keeping the track moving without very many dry spots. New to HD is ‘Fast Females’ that is an eight-minute look at all the female characters of the franchise including the fourth film.‘Hollywood Impact’ takes a look at the franchise’s success and how it fits in. Some film critics like Maltin pop up to offer explanations of why the franchise is so popular, yada, yada. ‘Inside 2 Fast 2 Furious’ is a nine-minutes behind-the-scenes featurette, ‘Prelude to 2 Fast 2 Furious’ is a quick featurette centered around Walker, ‘Deleted Scenes’ and ‘Outtakes’ runs about five minutes, ‘Actors Driving School’, ‘Supercharged Stunts’, ‘Making Music with Ludacris’ are short featurettes and are what they sound like. We also get ‘Actor Spotlights’ with quick interviews with the major cast, ‘Car Spotlights’ with car info and two deleted scenes listed as ‘Furious Afterburners’. The U-Control for this pic has three events that consist of tech specs on the cars, an ‘Animated Anecdotes’ track that’s essentially a trivia track and a Picture-in-Picture with behind the scenes footage and cast/crew interviews. The disc is also BD-Live enabled.

‘Making of the Fast Franchise’ is about seventeen minutes long and covers the franchise as a whole – mostly fluff stuff. ‘Drift: A Sideways Craze’ is a whopping hour long doc that looks at the real-life techniques of drifting, the people obsessed with it, the trend starters, etc. It’s well-done and quite fascinating. ‘Deleted Scenes’, ‘Drifting School’ shows some of the cast attempting some real-life drifting, ‘Cast Cam’ is a short behind-the-scenes shot by cast and crew, ‘The Big Breakdown: Han’s Last Ride’ takes a look at the Tokyo chase sequence, ‘Tricked Out to Drift’ examines the various cars used in the film. ‘Welcome to drifting’ is a short making of, ‘The Real Drift King’ examines Keiichi Tsuchiya who is the real-life drift king. ‘Custom Made Drifter’ is an interactive feature that allows you to design your own car. ‘The Japanese Way’ takes a look at the mostly American crew getting used to filming in Japan. A music video by Don Omar is also provided with U-Control presenting events for ‘Storyboards’, ‘GPS’ which tracks the locations of the cars during the chase sequences and ‘Tech Specs’ which gives stats on all the cars. The disc is also BD-Live enabled and each pic comes with its own digital copy. No one that’s going to pick up this set will be expecting Kurosawa and honestly, I kind of like all of these films in a cheesy, exploitation sort of way. They all look and sound outstanding with a plethora of special features so if your one of those peeps that live their life one quarter-mile at a time, this set comes highly recommended. The Fast and the Furious Trilogy [Blu-ray] is now available at Amazon. Visit the DVD database for more information.