Film Review: 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003)
This is the second part of the review series. The first instalment is here.
A sequel nobody wanted to make, made anyway
2 Fast 2 Furious is a major disappointment, unsurprising given that Vin Diesel declined to appear even in cameo, with the whole burden dumped on Paul Walker and nothing in the way of script, and John Singleton's direction and the change of scenery unable to compensate.
But the interesting thing about the second instalment is not that it is bad. Plenty of second instalments are bad. The interesting thing is that in failing, it accidentally assembled the machinery that would keep this series alive for another two decades — and it did so at precisely the moment its star walked out of the door.
The bet
Diesel's absence was not a scheduling accident. It was a career strategy, and the strategy had a title: xXx.
That film, released the previous August, was an explicit attempt to build a Bond substitute for the MTV generation — an extreme-sports anarchist with tattoos and a Rammstein cameo, recruited by Samuel L. Jackson's NSA to infiltrate a gang of post-Soviet renegades in Prague. Rob Cohen, who had directed the first Fast film, directed it. Diesel was the whole poster. The play was to become a sole star at the centre of his own franchise, rather than one of two leads in somebody else's, and the reported asking price for a Fast sequel — around $20 million plus a producer's credit and a slice of the gross — was the number that made the choice easy for Universal to decline and easy for him to make.
As a piece of casting arithmetic it worked: xXx took $277 million worldwide on a $70 million budget. As a piece of franchise-building it was a catastrophe. The sequel, xXx: State of the Union, arrived in 2005 with Ice Cube in the lead and took $71 million, and the series sat dead for twelve years until Diesel came back to it. He had bet on being irreplaceable, and the market had told him that a franchise built around a single torso is only as durable as that torso's last opening weekend. The thing he was trying to escape — the ensemble — turned out to be the only thing that would still be employing him in 2026. There is a certain grim comedy in the fact that the series he walked away from to prove his solo value is now the one whose cast list functions as his pension.
The burden, and the swap
So Walker carries it alone. He is not, on the evidence, able to. Brian O'Conner has been relocated to Miami, living off illegal drag races, and the film's opening act asks Walker to be a leading man in the mould of the one who left — to hold a frame with charisma rather than diffidence. He manages it the way he managed everything: by being pleasant, athletic and slightly vacant.
What the film does instead, and what matters far more, is to stop asking him to be Dom's mirror and start asking him to be somebody's foil. Brian is remodelled from undercover cop into fugitive, and the hole in the double act is filled not with a Diesel substitute but with a different kind of relationship entirely: Roman Pearce (Tyrese Gibson), the childhood friend turned paroled criminal, recruited into the customs sting against the Argentinian narco Carter Verone (Cole Hauser, all oil and dentistry, watching a rat and a lizard in a bucket as though taking notes on management).
The Brian–Roman register is bickering, needling, mutual insult — a marriage, essentially, and the first time the series sounds like itself. Walker's blandness, which the first film used as a blank surface for the audience to enter through, here becomes a comic straight man's blandness. The series had discovered that it could re-cast a relationship rather than an actor. Swap the foil, keep the shape; swap the city, keep the noise. This is the moment the principle that would later be formalised as "the game is more important than the single player" enters the franchise — not as a design decision but as an improvisation under duress. The star is a role, not a person.
Two films later the series would run that principle as an experiment with both leads absent, and nearly die of it; two films after that it would survive the actual death of one of them. Both outcomes trace back here, to a production that had to work out how to proceed without its centre of gravity and chose, unwisely but consequentially, to proceed.
The very convenient bridge
The other piece of machinery is The Turbo Charged Prelude for 2 Fast 2 Furious, a seven-minute short directed by Philip Atwell and distributed as promotion and on the DVD.
It exists to solve a problem of the film-makers' own making: the first film ends with Brian handing Dom the keys to his father's Charger and letting a wanted man drive into the dark, and the second opens with Brian in Florida. Something has to happen in between. The Prelude supplies it in almost pure montage — Brian fleeing Los Angeles in the Supra, racing for cash in small towns, sleeping in the car, crossing the country, arriving in Miami.
It is cheap, it is efficient, and it is a very convenient way of connecting two films that had no business being connected at all. It discharges the exposition the feature cannot spare running time for, keeps Walker's face in front of the audience between instalments, and costs roughly what a day of second-unit work costs. It also establishes something the franchise would lean on repeatedly: that this story could be told in side-channels, in fragments released around the main text, and that a devoted audience would seek them out. Los Bandoleros, the 2009 short that does the same job for the fourth film, is its direct descendant.
As a piece of storytelling, mind, it is a patch. The first film's ending was ambiguous and therefore generative; the second film's opening needed a prologue because the second film had no interest in the consequences of that ambiguity. The Prelude bridges the gap so smoothly that nobody has to notice there was never a plan.
Singleton in Miami
Singleton was, on paper, the most interesting hire the series ever made and would remain so until James Wan and Justin Lin arrived with actual craft. A director of Boyz n the Hood on a $76 million studio picture about Miami street racing should have produced something with heat and class in it, and the film does occasionally glance at one: the criminal economy as an employment scheme, the racers as small businessmen, the customs task force as just another crew with a budget. Verone's operation is introduced as a legitimate front — clubs, property, a small empire — which is precisely the sort of detail Singleton would notice.
But the script, by Michael Brandt and Derek Haas, is inert. The plot is a series of errands, the procedural mechanics are even flimsier than the first film's, and the climax is a boat. Singleton's visual sense survives mostly in the colour — all bleached concrete and turquoise — and in the fact that the cars are photographed with affection rather than as props: the bridge jump that opens the film is genuinely fine work. It is a journeyman's job by a non-journeyman, and the waste is palpable.
What was assembled
Line the pieces up and the film's actual function becomes clear. It invents the amnesty plot — a government agency offers a wanted crew a clean slate in exchange for a job — which becomes the standard engine of parts six, seven and eight. It establishes the crew as a cast rather than a couple. It establishes that a Fast film can be made without Vin Diesel, and that a Fast film can be made with a new setting, new supporting players and a fresh tone. None of these innovations is executed well here. All of them are load-bearing later.
Which is why the film's failure needs to be separated from its usefulness. It is not a good picture. The dialogue is coarse without being witty, the villain is a bucket of tics, the plotting is slack, and the absence at its centre is felt in every scene — Verone is not a patch on Dom as an antagonist, and the film never finds a reason for Brian to be in Miami other than that the studio wanted palm trees. But it is the film in which the series stopped being a two-hander and became a machine, and machines do not need every part to be present.
Verdict
2 Fast 2 Furious is the weakest of the first four films and the most important of them. It gets almost everything wrong — the script, the pacing, the villain, the central performance — and yet it is where the franchise learned the trick that would let it absorb Diesel's absence in this film and the next one, and Walker's death in the seventh. The Prelude bridges the two films with an economy that borders on insolence. The buddy pairing with Roman is the first genuinely pleasurable thing in the series. And Singleton's Miami is a glimpse of the better, more grounded film nobody was given time to write.
Bad film; necessary one.
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