The second movie I saw this weekend was "The Fast and the Furious", a movie that from the previous the only inkling I had was that there were fast cars involved. I did happen to see an interview with Vin Diesel where I got a bit more of the plot. So it's more like "Point Break", where you have an under- cover police officer infiltrating a testorine-filled gang of danger-junkies.

This particular gang hijacks eighteen-wheelers, on the road, by boarding them and tranquilizing the drivers. They've hijacked four shipments in the last four months, totalling six-million in retail value (netting maybe a million for the hijackers). Some fine precision driving and custom cars point to the street racing underworld, and the best street racer is Dominic Toretto (Diesel).

Officer Brian O'Conner (Paul Walker) is assigned to infiltrate the street racers and find out who is responsible for the crimes. Naturally, O'Conner decides to get into Toretto's group, figuring that if anyone would know who is responsible it would be Toretto. Of course it's also nice that Toretto has a pretty sister that O'Conner can hit on (Mia, played by Jordana Brewster).

What a better way to break into the streetracing world than to beat the best? This is what O'Conner tries to do by challenging Toretto to a race. I'm not sure how faithful the depiction of the world is, but the movie paints them as being relatively well organized. Once the race is determined, everybody cruises to the race site (we're talking like 40-50 cars vrooming along town) where the spectators block off the intersections. One guy listens to a police scanner and when the police are pulled off to a high-profile crime the race can begin.

The race is on. It's a quarter mile race that's over in less than 10 seconds, but since that would be way too boring it's filmed as a long sequence with postprocessing to make the backgrounds blurry. O'Conner almost wins but blows out some part of his engine. Since he didn't have $10k for the entrance fee (there were four racers) he put up his car. But before Toretto can claim it the police are sent to stop the street racers. Everybody takes off. Toretto ditches his car and tries to nonchalantly get away on foot, but he's spotted and is rescued by O'Conner.

For keeping him out of the slammer, O'Conner is now Toretto's friend and slowly is brought into the group. Toretto's group is composed of his girl friend Letty (Michelle Rodriguez), his childhood friend Vince (Matt Schulze), mechanic Jesse (Chad Lindberg, and I mistook this Lindberg for Giovanni Ribisi), and Leon (Johnny Strong). But, just because he's in the group does not mean that it'll be easy to find out who are the hijackers.

Plenty of suspects abound. Besides Toretto's group there is the Mexican group led by Hector (Noel Gugliemi) and the asian group led by Johnny Tran (Rick Yune). Tran in particular is actively hostile to Toretto because Toretto defiled Tran's sister, so Tran is also hostile to O'Conner. O'Conner has his hands full investigating the groups while staying in Toretto's good graces while romancing Mia while clashing with the FBI (in charge of the case) who want to blame everything on Toretto.

One of the big plot points of the movie is Street Wars, an annual event for street racers held at some abandoned army base. O'Conner has this car he needs to totally rebuild before the event while the other groups have their own secrets and machinations. There's not that much racing. More character interactions and developing the plot. You sort of have to, there's only so much you can film with cars racing down a stretch of straight road.

It's not a bad movie and I enjoyed it. The only problem I saw is that the ending leaves a lot of things up in the air. A lot of action movies do this. They resolve the main plot and then stop the film, mostly because the clean up and other things would be boring and anti-climatic. Usually I don't notice but this time as the movie faded out to credits I was thinking "so what happens next?" It just seemed to end a bit too quickly. But other than that it's a good action movie.