Pacino and DeNiro It Was Not


So I just witnessed the latest in the Fast and Furious pentalogy. There isn't too much to say about the movie. Crammed in a lot of characters. The filmmaker is a fan of Clear and Present Danger. The Rock is juicing. Vin Diesel has a nice cool ease with laconic dialog. The theater was surprisingly packed for a Tuesday evening. I'm puzzling who this movie is for. I can't decide whether it is a fusion of various American middle class sensibilities - blue collar labor, ethnic family bonds, an uncomplicated Catholicism, all under a hip-hop aesthetic or whether it is just a movie for teenage boys.

Vin Diesel and the Rock square off. It is not memorable and will be the butt of many lame stand up jokes, I imagine. I can't tell if I'm supposed to understand something about America in this film. There is something about this preposterous casting of each and every ethnic minority that reminds me of the way Barack Obama went about picking a Supreme Court justice. Ummm...let's add in a touch of Asian here to take the edge off the Blacks in the background...and here is an Israeli because none of these people would work with an Arab. I don't know. Is that ridiculous? Maybe so. Then again, maybe this is what Martin Luther King imagined. A multi-ethnic cast driving around the streets of Rio in old time American muscle cars dragging a huge safe with a drug dealers money.