Vin ran out of Diesel. (Spoilers)

I’m sitting here with my Vietnamese canned cappuccino at 8a.m. on a Sunday thinking about 2 Fast 2 Furious, a film that I watched last night. If you’re wondering what Italy has to do with 2 Fast 2 Furious I’ll explain that right now; absolutely nothing. I just felt like narrating my life in this opening sequence because I’m tired and I’m not really sure what I should be writing here since the premise of Catching Up is pretty self-explanatory.

2 Fast 2 Furious is notable for a few reasons in the series, the first being that it’s the only mainline movie (plus spinoff Hobbs & Shaw) where Vin Diesel doesn’t appear. Diesel turned down a reported $25 million on the grounds that the script sucked, and the world is better off for it because he instead starred in Chronicles of Riddick. Incidentally the Riddick series was my alternate choice if I couldn’t find Fast and Furious streaming for my next Catching Up series. Funny how these things come together. Diesel would later admit regret for turning down the role and not working to make the script better.

Set a little while after the ending of the first movie, 2 Fast 2 Furious brings back Paul Walker as Brian O’Conner, a man who constantly walks around with an apple wedged in his butt cheeks. The first movie was funnier because O’Conner is a terrible undercover cop and is basically outed immediately but nobody believes the guy who spots him because they’re all focused on winning the big race. O’Conner is now a racist on the run from police where all the racists retire to, Florida, when he gets arrested by the police using a fancy new sci-fi weapon and given an ultimatum. Become an undercover cop again that we fired you from, or go to the jail prison.

2 Fast 2 Furious introduces a few new recurring characters. Eva Mendes plays Monica Fuentes, a Customs agent who will have one cameo in Fast 5. Tyrese Gibson plays Roman Pearce, an ex-associate of Brian’s who is still with the series along with Ludacris who plays Tej Parker, the guy whose job is to remind us he’s banging 80% of the women cast members. Tej’s job is also to make the audience jealous by having an ongoing relationship with Suki, played by the gorgeous Devon Aoki. Aoki doesn’t appear in-person in any future films, and has been retired from acting to focus on her family.

Outside of Paul Walker, the only other carry-over from the first movie I’m aware of is Bilkins played by Thom Barry. Thom doesn’t appear in any further movies although it’s not because his character dies. 2 Fast 2 Furious has a villain but I’d be hesitant to call him the “bad guy.” Cole Hauser plays Carter Verone, a guy who deals drugs and occasionally tortures police officers. His henchmen Enrique (Matt Gallini) and Roberto (Roberto Sanchez) are hilariously incompetent, and he seems to mostly be wanted for money laundering which if he was a white guy the cops wouldn’t really care too much about.

I’m just saying the cops are the bigger bad guys in this film. They’re the ones who kidnap O’Conner who is just trying to live an honest life street racing in obscurity and use the threat of violent rape (this is 2003 when male prison rape jokes were still considered cutely hilarious in films) to coerce him into a plot that they then repeatedly try to foil. Seriously the biggest threat to O’Conner’s life in this movie are the cops who multiple times almost blow his cover through their own incompetence and lack of trust.

There are some good races in 2 Fast, including that fantastic scene where they have all the cars flood out of the warehouse at the same time to throw the police off the chase. Seriously, did I mention that the cops are the biggest bad guys in this movie? I guess this is the point where the series just goes into casual brushed off deaths, because wow did they not pay much attention to the guy who gets flattened under the truck tires. I did happen to see a list of the death counts in future films and by Fast 7 there’s like 100+ deaths per movie, mostly of guys named terrorist.

What a franchise.

Overall I would say 2 Fast 2 Furious is worse than The Fast and the Furious and Vin Diesel was right to run Chronicles of Riddick instead. It’s not a bad movie but compared to the first it’s just a generic cop movie but with some racing thrown in. I’ve heard that Tokyo Drift is also a side-plot film and then 2009’s Fast & Furious is where it gets back on track to an actual series. We’ll see film, we’ll see.

I also noticed that the film doesn’t know what “thirty five large” means as it should mean thirty five thousand dollars, but the racers in the first race only bet $3,500. Once again you could drive a truck through the inconsistencies between shots in the film, but who cares.