Fast and Not As Furious As I Should Be

I believe my IQ dropped significantly after Friday night. My husband convinced to see Fast Five, the fifth installment of The Fast and the Furious franchise. In truth, it didn't take much persuasion. He even gave me the choice between Pirates and Fast Five, but, alas, I chose the latter. And I'm not even sure why.

Maybe it's because I have (sadly) seen all of the other Fast and Furious movies, and I had some neurotic impulse to complete the cycle. Perhaps I thought if I saw something extremely masculine, Dan would be more likely to take me to Jane Eyre on my birthday in a couple of weeks. Or it could have been some unexplained void that only sweaty versions (and I mean, dripping off the body like molasses) of Paul Walker, Vin Diesel, and the Rock could fill. (There - how do you men like being treated like some objectified piece of meat?)

I was also just plain curious. The film, unlike its predecessors, has been garnering critical acclaim with high scores on both Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes. (What is the world coming to when a car-racing movie - sequel number five, no less - scores higher than Water for Elephants?)

Vin Diesel was quoted in Time as saying, "I wouldn't be surprised if there is some Oscar talk around this."

Ummm . . . okay.

I don't know that testosterone-laden stare downs qualify a movie as Oscar-worthy.

Every time beefy Vin Diesel donned an especially intense mien and made a comment like, "Change of plans" or "Big mistake," my husband, Dan, would lean over and whisper, "Now that's an Oscar-worthy performance."

Nonetheless, the Fast and Furious movies have always been one of my guilty pleasures as contradictory to my nature as that may seem.

I've never enjoyed such a blatantly sexist set of films in my life. We're talking scantily clad women galore with lots of cleavage . . . and not just in the pectoral region. Even the weapon-wielding token female characters, who are apparently the male characters' equals in toughness, use their sexuality to get the job done. And the ratio of women (supposedly with brains, but that's debatable) to men on the Fast Five crew is about 2:9.

And the line that elicited the most laughs?

"Sexy legs, baby girl. What time do they open?"

The response?

"They open at the same time I pull this trigger (she pulls a gun on him). Want me to open them?"

Throughout my two-hour swashbuckling theater experience, I found myself wondering how much carbon was emitted into the air during the making of this movie. Every time the characters smashed a vehicle through a building or took out a bank or a concrete wall, I thought, "Who is going to clean up that mess?" And this was a source of great anxiety for me during the film because of some irrational fear of mine that I, in fact, would be the one cleaning up everything in the end.

I don't make it a habit to go to movies where the audience members interact with what is happening on screen. But during this flick, there was an outburst of (most definitely male) hoots and hollers every time there was an explosion or a fast-moving car making hairpin turns.

"But did you like the movie?" Dan asked me as we exited the theater.

I said I really enjoyed it, especially the heist story, "But don't tell anyone; it might ruin my reputation as a self-sufficient, chauvinist-hating feminist."

"I did get a little bored during car chase scenes," I added, "but I guess those were to be expected."

"Duh. It's a car movie."



(These are a few of the cars from The Fast and the Furious film franchise. They were on display at Universal Studios in Orlando when we visited in 2004.)