2 Fast 2 Furious Review

Losing Vin Diesel cost this film its center and nothing in it fills the hole. Singleton, a serious director working well below his level, swaps the sodium grime of Los Angeles for a Miami rendered in lime green and hot pink, and the color grading does most of the acting. Paul Walker carries the lead without the counterweight that made him watchable the first time, so Brian becomes a grinning surfer with a badge and no interior life.

The plot is a laundering sting assembled from spare parts, the villain is a nonentity who exists to be arrested, and the finale asks you to accept a car landing on a yacht as a climax rather than a joke. Tyrese Gibson is the one genuine asset, loose and funny and clearly improvising his way past the dialogue, and the friction between Roman and Brian is the only relationship here with a pulse. The stunt driving is competent and forgettable. This is the entry the series had to survive rather than build on, and every later film quietly pretends it happened somewhere else.