For starters, I feel as though I may have bet on the wrong horse when I arbitrarily decided to like Vin Diesel, who seems like kind of a tool, over The Rock, who's a douche, but who can exude a speck of humanity. Plus which they appear to have actual beef with each other, unless it was just a publicity stunt, and I bet I know which one's the bitch.
As if there were ever a limit to the preposterousness of these movies, this one comes along to remind you that's not the case. This has people jumping out of fast cars without getting a scratch, surviving explosions intact, driving onto cargo holds of airplanes on the tarmac at 200 mph and coming to a perfect stop instantly, and so on, as well as the most base, naked sentimentality you would shun in any normal kind of movie.* So it's fundamentally unsatisfying, yet you'll want to find how it resolves anyway (well, if you're me). And of course the resolution is completely stupid and just what you'd expect, except maybe a little worse.
The parts filmed in New York, which I was particularly interested in seeing, are a total letdown: the editing of those chases, if it even needs to be said, is such that you can't tell -- you can only intuit -- that there's no continuity in terms of location, whatsoever. Compare with something like the masterful sequence in 1973's
The Seven-Ups, which actually tracks the cars through a real sequence of places. The (I *guess*) real sets, which you can only see for about a quarter of a second at a time, only underscore how much more like a video game than a cinematic experience this stuff calls to mind.
* This is coming from someone who actually wept at the revelation that the character of Paul whatsisname, the actor who later died, and his girl were going to have a baby in episode 5 (or 6 or 4 or something). To be fair, we were going to have a baby then too, so that may have had something to so with it.
