Butt News Movie Club #2: The Fast and the Furious

The Music in This Movie Is So Bad It’s Like Cars Are Playing the Instruments

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VROOOOOOOM!!!!!!! It’s car time! The trucks are going on the highway and the cars are just chasing them like all over the place. The trucks are big but the cars are fast. The trucks are loaded and the cars need the stuff inside. The cars drive up over by the trucks and a guy pops up and he shoots a big fork on a rope through the truck’s front window. It’s the only way to get over there and grab those Panasonic combo TV/VCRs, which were currency in 2001!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The guy from the car pulls himself up into the cab of the truck and he and the truck driver fight. The truck driver is like, “No way, Jose! I’m going to protect these TV/VCR hybrids with my life! Nothing is more important to me than getting these babies safely to Circuit City! You Future Shop people need to just give up!”

This deranged capitalist fantasy—the expectation that a truck driver would voluntarily FIGHT TO THE DEATH against a heavily armed vigilante, almost certainly against union rules, in order to protect an utterly disposable payload that isn’t even his property out of some sort of abstract loyalty to the supply chain and/or whatever corporation begrudgingly underpays him—really could have saved us a lot of grief had we stopped and read the subtext 20 years ago!!!!!!!

Meanwhile, Paul Walker is driving VERY kooky in a green car in California. He spins around and around and then he says fuck! Swearing makes him so hungry that he’s just gotta get over to Vin Diesel’s hot, dark tuna hut and slurp some fishmush PRONTO. This is some sort of combination bodega/tuna restaurant where all the drag racers hang out, which is definitely a real kind of business. Paul Walker flirts with the tuna girl by asking how the tuna is, which I’m just realizing now is probably a NASTY innuendo! Vin Diesel watches suspiciously from the back room, no doubt on the look-out for his arch-nemesis, Vin Unleaded.

Then a bunch of guys in the worst outfits I’ve ever seen get out of some cars. One of the guys, Vince, can smell that Paul Walker just said some horny shit to tuna girl, whom he loves, so HE says THIS line of dialogue, which is BASICALLY the first line of real dialogue in the whole entire movie, so PLEASE join me in imagining an adult man kicking off the table read like this:

“What’s up with this fool? What is he—sandwich crazy?????”

H

E

L

P

And THEN Vince says THIS, which I guess was normal in 2001(!!?!??!?!), but in 2021 is a real record scratch and an extremely w i l d thing for a character WHO IS LATER REDEEMED to drop in the first 4 minutes of a movie: “Try Fatburger from now on—you can get yourself a double cheese with fries for $2.99, [f-slur]!!!!!”

Fortunately for this rapidly escalating hate crime, Paul Walker is not, in fact, sandwich crazy—he is sandwich stone cold.

Paul Walker: “I like the tuna here.”

Vince: “Bullshit, asshole, no one likes the tuna here.”

Paul Walker: “Yeah, well I do.”

Vin Diesel to Tuna Girl: “What’d you put in that sandwich?”

This movie is way more about sandwiches than I expected.

Vin Diesel slimes out of his tuna hole to get mad at Paul Walker for fighting Vince, even though he knows Vince really well and Vince is an obvious nightmare and sandwich reactionary, and for some reason Paul Walker doesn’t just explain what actually happened?? Like, hey man, I was just eating a sandwich and then this guy, who apparently works for Fatburger, showed up and went absolutely fucking apeshit?????? Instead, Vin Diesel tells Paul Walker not to come around here again.

Paul Walker is bummed out. He HAS to become best friends with these car guys, for reasons we don’t know yet! Luckily, he knows just what to do. HE NEED NOS.

Paul Walker goes back to his job at THE RACER’S EDGE, a car parts store where all the racers buy the car parts to make their cars go fast. He tells his boss “I NEED NOS!” He needs NOS by tonight!!!!! His boss is like “But Paul Walker, it’s too dangerous to have NOS!” Paul Walker doesn’t care!

It’s nighttime now, and at nighttime all the car guys and the car sluts go down to Car Street to car. It’s a really gratuitously aggro, inhospitable scene for a “community” supposedly obsessed with “family,” as I understand from the F9 commercials. Everyone is just loud and mean to each other for no reason!

For instance, Ja Rule goes up to Paul Walker and is like, “Is this your car?” in a tone in which someone might say, “Hey! Did you just shit on my porch!?” And Paul Walker says something like, “I’m standing by it, aren’t I?” And then Ja Rule says: “It’s not how you stand by your car, it’s how you race your car.”

YEAH, EVERYONE KNOWS THAT. YOU’RE AT A CAR RACE. WHY WOULD IT BE HOW YOU STAND BY YOUR CAR? BUT MORE IMPORTANTLY, WHY ARE YOU MAD AT HIM!?!?!?

It’s like they made the skits from wrestling into an entire movie. It’s like they looked at a sticker of Calvin peeing on something and thought, “there’s a movie here.” We forced a bot to read 10,000 pages of other scripts written by bots, plus one car manual and a speech by the My Pillow Guy, and this is what it came up with!

Anyway, the scene at the car race is VERY cool. VERY pink corduroy fedora, skirt over jeans, napkin as a top, Dirrty-era Christina Aguilera blonde-hair-on-top-black-hair-underneath vibes. The skirts? Hanky hem. The vests? Elizabethan. The highlights? CHUNKY. Which is all very cute, but sorry, THERE IS NO WAY THERE AREN’T LIKE A MILLION 57-YEAR-OLD WHITE GUYS NAMED GREG WITH BEER BELLIES AND TUCKED-IN COMPANY POLOS AT THE CAR RACES.

Vin Diesel shows up with his crew, and Michelle Rodriguez is like, “I smell [sniff sniff] skanks—why don’t you girls just pack it up before you get treadmarks on your face?” Remember when that was the only model for how girls could interact with each other? What a racket! We did that for so long!

Paul Walker wants to race so he can win the respect of Vin Diesel and be reunited with his tuna goddess. He bets his special green car. He is confident because of the NOS. “If I win, I take the cash and I take the respect.” Paul Walker says that respect is worth more than a car! Something 2 think about!

The music in this movie is so bad it’s like cars are playing the instruments.

A pizza man accidentally drives into the drag race area and someone yells, “Street’s closed, pizza boy! Find another way home!” Dude! He’s not going home! He’s trying to deliver a pizza! This bothered me so much!

A girl takes Ja Rule’s hand and places it on her jug. She tells him, “This is yours whether you win or lose. But if you win, you get her too [gestures to second jug as well as nearby girl with additional two jugs].” She absolutely reneges on this promise later and I hope Ja Rule sued her ass off!!!!!!

Okay, so then they race. Paul Walker is doing bad. But then he toots his NOS can #1 and speeds up! Ja Rule: “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!” Paul Walker’s laptop is like, “Warning! Danger to Manifold!” but Paul Walker says, “Shut up!” The NOS makes Paul Walker’s floor fall off, but he doesn’t care! He needs the respect!!!!!!!! It looks like he’s actually going to win this thing!

Unfortunately, at the last minute, Vin Diesel reveals he has one more secret car button and he pushes it and zooms away. Paul Walker is a fucking loser. The lesson here: always make sure you have one more button than the other guy!

Then they all have to run away from the cops. Vin Diesel almost gets caught, but then Paul Walker rescues him even though I thought his car was totally fucked up! Vin Diesel reveals that he did some research on Paul Walker: “You can find anything on the web. Anything about anybody.” Not in 2001 you couldn’t! Unless you mean you found Paul Walker’s Livejournal, in which case, can we pivot to that?

Hey I know hindsight is 20/20 but if he really wanted to promote these movies Paul Walker should have legally changed his name to Paul DRIVER. That would have been so good! Then maybe this franchise wouldn’t have been such a fucking failure!

Suddenly their car is surrounded by an Asian motorcycle gang, and DON’T ASK ME how these guys knew Vin Diesel was in that random raggedy green car driving down a random street in LA and then managed to coordinate 30 crotch rockets to spontaneously surround it. But okay!

The gang is led by Johnny Tran, who is very mad at Vin Diesel for something. They argue about something that I COULD NOT pay attention to, and then Johnny Tran says, “I’ll see you in the desert next month,” and then Johnny Tran’s Cousin Lance shoots the car until it explodes because of all the leftover NOS! Lesson #2: that’s why u always gotta pump all ur NOS even if it’s messing with ur manifold bc u never know when u might run into Johnny Tran and his cousin Lance!

After their brush with death, Vin Diesel and Paul Walker go to a party, where someone is playing electric guitar (where’s Cousin Lance when you need him?). As punishment for abandoning him to the cops, Vin Diesel confiscates Vince’s beer and gives it to Paul Walker. Hey, man, appreciate the thank-you gift, but CAN’T HE HAVE A NEW ONE!? Vince licked all over this one!

Friendship ended with Fatburger; now tuna sandwich is Vin Diesel’s new best friend!

Paul Walker gets arrested for being part of the street race, and you’re like oh shit how’s he gonna get out of this one, but then the movie is like PSYCH! MORE LIKE HE GETS PICKED UP BY HIS BROSKIS FOR A LIL SLUMBER PARTY BECAUSE TUNA BOY’S A FREAKING COP HIMSELF! I was somehow genuinely surprised by this incredibly obvious plot twist, which was the most embarrassing moment of my life.

This movie works really hard to cast the cops as effete liberal clowns—they all drink “iced cappuccinos” and for their HQ they’ve inexplicably rented a midcentury mansion that must cost MINIMUM $35k/month (one time a friend of mine, Friend A, needed a short-term rental for a job in LA and another friend, Friend B, said she had a friend-of-a-friend with a house for rent and it turned out that Friend B’s friend-of-a-friend was a very big movie star [redacted, sorry!!!!!!!!!], and Friend B checked with Movie Star about the rent and it was $200k a month, and he was like “so…does [Friend A] want it?” and I’ve just never regained consciousness!)—which I guess is to make the very tough and x-tremely masc racey boys seem EVEN TOUGHER by comparison, and I don’t really have a take on that choice, it’s just something I noticed.

Here’s where we find out The Plot.

The chief is like: “Four hijackings in two months and we don’t have anything. DVD players and digital cameras alone worth a million-2, which brings the grand total to 6 million plus.”

Six million dollars in DVD players were stolen!?!? That’s over six million DVD players!!!!!!!!

They know that somebody in the street racing world is behind the electronics thefts. Paul Walker has to infiltrate the street racing world in order to find the thieves, or else—and this is the REAL CENTRAL URGENT DRIVER OF THE PLOT—"truckers will take matters into their own hands.”

So, just to sum up, the plot of The Fast and the Furious 1 is that Paul Walker, a cop who knows how to drive, has to go undercover with a gang of fast driving car guys in order to stop the relatively small-scale theft of Panasonic TV/VCR hybrids, DVD players, and digital cameras, because otherwise some truck drivers might get really mad. Trucks vs. cars!?!!?? I hate it when mommy and daddy fight!

Vin Diesel decides that Paul Walker is going to enter a big street race “in the desert” called “Race Wars,” so that he can “make some money off [Paul Walker’s] ass.”

Just then, Vince shows up in a profoundly 2001 outfit:

A lot of people forget that that’s literally what the Pope wore in 2001.

It’s a mesh tank top layered over a camouflage tank top. And he’s wearing the hell out of it! The thing about two tank tops—are you hot or are you cold? It’s like the old sleeveless turtleneck problem, a thing I also tried very hard to make work in 2001.

They all sit down for family dinner (“Let’s eat some grub, man!” – Michelle Rodriguez, effortless), and then after dinner all the boys go off to watch a movie while tuna girl stays in the kitchen to wash the dishes. Paul Walker offers to help, like, “The cook doesn’t clean where I come from,” and she goes, “Well, I’d like to go there.”

YOU CAN LIVE THERE NOW! JUST DON’T DO THE DISHES FOR THESE GROWN MEN! As far as I can tell, you’re the only one in this group with a job, you’re also going to school, you cooked this entire dinner—I’m going to say these people need you more than you need them? These guys are constantly, like, eating chicken wings over a steaming engine block. Are you sure you even like them? “Yeah! Those aren’t grill marks—we just drove over the chicken with a tiny car!” Fly free, tuna baby. Get out.

This is the weirdest movie I have ever seen. The sound mix is unhinged, the music is SO LOUD, and then the “dialogue” is just uncharismatic people reading a car manual out loud under their breath, Paul Walker is furiously channeling Matrix Keanu Reeves, arguably the least likeable Keanu Reeves, and then every once in a while Michelle Rodriguez will say something way overly aggressive like “TIME TO MAKE THIS SANDWICH MY BITCH!”

Some Mexican fellows come into Racer’s Edge to buy “three of everything” for their cars. Here I have to pause for my favorite part of every turn-of-the-century movie: WHAT THE FUCK INTERFACE IS THIS?

Paul Walker goes to snoop on the Latino car party. He breaks into a car building. He looks under all the cloths. It’s cars!!! Just like he thought it would be! The cars have tires. And they have bottoms of the cars. Paul Walker is disappointed. Then he gets clonked on the head by Vince! Vince can tell he’s a cop because he peeked under the car’s skirts at their panties, and as you will find out in a minute all cops are freaking perverted!

Okay. First of all, whose garage was he breaking into? Why are Vin Diesel’s guys even there? Were all of them following Paul Walker around literally all day? How did they all converge on this random location without even being able to drop a pin? The only navigation software they had at that time was the Racer’s Edge point of sale system!!!!

Paul Walker does a good save and tells them he was just trying to see what kind of tech Hector was running for “Race Wars.”

Vin Diesel mostly buys it, but he’s still a little suspicious. IS Paul Walker a cop?? Or does he just really not want to lose at “Race Wars”? Those are the two types of person!

I’m pretty sure that “cops” and “people real fixated on not losing the race war” are actually the same type of person.

HEY JUST A THOUGHT: MAYBE DON’T HAVE THE RACE BE CALLED “RACE WARS” WHEN LITERALLY ALL THE COMPETITORS ARE GANGS OF DIFFERENT RACES.

Then Paul and Vin and the gang go snooping together through a different(?) car building and PW spots the Panasonics! He’s cracked the case! But then, oh shit, here comes the Asians!!!!¹ And they’ve got a guy named Ted at gunpoint! It doesn’t matter who he is! They pump oil into Ted’s face so he’ll tell them where “the engines” are. Why do they gotta murder him in a car way? You guys gotta do everything like a car?

Eventually, Ted gives them all the information they need: “In a warehouse!”

Johnny Tran’s like, “Let’s go get our engines.”

ARGH! I KNEW WE SHOULD HAVE CHECKED “A WAREHOUSE”!

Some random cop tells PW that he thinks his crush on tuna girl is clouding his ability to see that Vin Diesel is the real culprit: “I don’t blame you—I’d get off on her surveillance photos too.” Sorry. You’re jerking off to surveillance photos? Do cops know that there’s just porn on the internet???? Go to Webcrawler and type “tuna sandwich boobs horny”!!!!

I know I already touched on this but I don’t feel that we’ve adequately acknowledged that the whole justification for this MASSIVE POLICE OPERATION is that they’re worried some truckers are going to arm themselves and do vigilante self-defense against the Asian (or are they??????????) DVD thieves. AND they’re just sitting around masturbating!? ABOLISH! THE! POLICE! THIS IS SUCH A WASTE OF MONEY!!!!!!!

The cops tell Paul Walker that Vin Diesel once beat a guy with a ¾-inch torque wrench because, again, everything has to be a car thing. PW knows there must be more to the story and he’s gonna find out.

Vin Diesel shows Paul Walker his secret car that belonged to his dad, who died from car racing: “I watched my dad burn to death. I remember hearing him scream. People over there said that he had died before the tanks blew. They said it was me who was screaming.” Um, okay!

So I guess the guy Vin beat up with the torque wrench—it’s his fault that his dad exploded? I wasn’t totally paying attention.

Paul Walker takes tuna girl on a date to Cha Cha Cha, and you literally cannot hear any of the dialogue in this scene. Then they bang.

Now there’s a montage set to some sort of screaming rap-rock from hell during which:

-       Michelle Rodriguez is working on a car in leather pants

-       Michelle Rodriguez and Vin Diesel fuck in the garage SO AWKWARDLY that I’m introducing a bill to make sex illegal

-       He picks her up by the butt!!!! I kind of liked that part!

-       The cops move in and arrest Cousin Lance and Johnny Tran

It turns out that Johnny Tran’s 400 DVD players were “purchased legally” (WHY???????) so now the chief is mad at Paul Walker: “Is this the kind of intel I can expect?”

IDK I FEEL LIKE YOU TOLD PAUL WALKER THAT A STREET RACING GANG STOLE A BUNCH OF DVD PLAYERS AND THEN PAUL WALKER FOUND A BUNCH OF DVD PLAYERS IN THE HQ OF A STREET RACING GANG, SO COULD YOU PLEASE BACK OFF? SORRY JOHNNY TRAN LOVES DVD PLAYERS SO MUCH!!!!!

The chief says PW has “36 hours to crack this bastard or you might want to start thinking about another career,” which is so mean.

PW and VD go to Neptune’s Net for some fried clams, and I’ve eaten there too! It was in 2011, the day before my boyfriend (now husband—we got back together, don’t worry) broke up with me. I remember crossing PCH over to the beach and standing in the water, it was stormy, and telling my friend about how something felt wrong in my relationship, I didn’t know what, but something was wrong, and rationalizing with myself that I was probably overreacting and it would be okay. He dumped me the next day, and that’s my one single memory of Neptune’s Net! It’s nice to finally replace that memory with a way worse one!

But you know the weirdest part? You know who I ran into when I was there? Johnny Tran!!!!!!

Paul Walker tries to get Vin Diesel to tell him about his secret side business of crime: “There’s no way you paid for all that stuff you got under the hood by doing tune-ups and selling groceries. Now whatever it is you’ve got going on, I want in on it too.” And sure, I guess Vin Diesel did almost murder you on suspicion of being a cop literally five minutes ago, but this seems like a great angle to take!

Instead of answering, Vin Diesel just gives him the directions to “Race Wars.”

This movie makes me regret having a soundbar for the TV. I wish my TV had worse sound. This movie sounds like I put a big bucket over my head. Except I WISH I had a big bucket over my head, because then it would be harder to hear the terrible sounds of this movie!

We’re finally at “Race Wars.” What is the format of “Race Wars??” Is it not an illegal event? Because there are like security guards and bleachers and stuff. Who races whom? What is the prize?

Michelle Rodriguez races a guy for sexually harassing her, and just when he thinks he’s going to win, she pushes her NOS button and then she wins. He didn’t know she had a winning button! The button that makes you win! He should have gotten a button that makes you win!!! That’s why this shit is fundamentally uninteresting to me. It’s just people buying things and putting them on their cars. The Fast and the Furious is clearly modeled after horse movies for girls, except it’s so much more boring, because with a horse you can’t just be like “Oh, I bought Black Beauty some bigger hooves!”

VD’s friend Jesse decides to race Johnny Tran and he loses, of course. Big loss for the whites.

It’s like the whole purpose of this movie is to drown out a barking dog.

PW tells tuna girl he’s a cop so she will help him stop VD from getting killed by an angry trucker: “Those truckers, they’re not laying down anymore!!!!” OKAY, BUT, AGAIN, THEY ARE JUST GUYS WHO DRIVE VCRS AROUND. Tuna girl’s like, “I’m sorry, I really don’t understand the plot of this movie. But okay.”

There’s a big heist planned for today. It’s “the mother lode.” It’s 6,000 laserdisc players. It’s 100,000 Furbies. PW and tuna have got to stop them.

I’m sorry again, but THERE’S SIMPLY NO WAY THAT THIS IS THE BEST WAY. That to steal DVD players you have to harpoon a truck? In the middle of the day? On the freeway? Why don’t you wait until they park???? There are literally locations called “truck stops” where the TRUCKS STOP.

Anyway, there’s a big action scene where the truck driver has a gun and Vince gets tangled in his harpoon and he’s hanging off the side of the truck and Michelle Rodriguez drives her car under the truck and she crashes and the truck driver defeats each of them one by one and never slows down, not once, and then Paul Walker shows up to save Vince, who is still wearing his mesh tank top BTW, and then Vince gets shot, understandably.

Paul Walker has to blow his own cover to call a helicopter to save Vince’s life, because that’s what they do for bad guys if they’re the police officer’s friend. VD confronts PW for being a cop—he’s v disappointed—and then Jesse shows up having a meltdown because he lost to Johnny Tran. Then everyone hears vrooooooooom! It’s the Asians² coming on the crotch rockets! The Asians do a drive-by and they kill Jesse for losing the race war and then not giving Johnny Tran his car. But couldn’t they just take the car????? I’m confused!

Then they all car-chase all over LA and eventually Johnny Tran and Cousin Lance both CRASH AND DIE. I know I’m not that into car culture, but I just don’t think this is worth a Jetta.

Uhhhhhh then Paul Walker and Vin Diesel do a drag race (for the respect??), and they are heading for a collision with a train, and it’s very suspenseful. But Vin Diesel’s not afraid of trains! They’re his family!

They both barely make it but then VD crashes into something else anyway, so PW gives him his car so he can escape.

Now this movie is over

????????????????????????????????????

WHAT’S THIS MOVIE ABOUT

THE MOVIE IS OVER NOW?!??!?!?!?!?!?!?!?

EXCUSE ME!?!?!?!?!?

A post-credits sequence reveals that Vin Diesel has fled the country to Baja, Mexico. Now he es muy rapido y muy furioso. Hasta la vista, Butt News!

1. Just to be clear, I WOULD NEVER DESCRIBE PEOPLE LIKE THIS. THE MOVIE DESCRIBES PEOPLE LIKE THIS.

2. I’m sorry, it’s just, literally this is the movie.