Rocket-Fast-Car-Boom

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Reading Desson Thomson's review of Fast & Furious with Vin Diesel for the Washington Post, I thought, "THIS is what the review of a genre picture should look like":

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“Fast & Furious,” which re-teams Vin Diesel and Paul Walker for the first time since 2001’s “The Fast and the Furious,” watches everything through a guy-calibrated telephoto lens. [. . .] The guy-centric principles remain the same. The things of beauty in the “F&F” universe? Nitro-jacked speedsters that do horizontally what the Cape Canaveral program does vertically. The six-pack-abbed guys standing next to those cars. And bullet-shaped Corona beers, so men can raise them to victory or—as one character so grandiloquently puts it—“to the ladies we’ve loved and the ladies we’ve lost.” As for the “ladies,” guys love ‘em, of course. But only the ones with 8 percent body fat need apply. The real love in their lives? Their rides, natch. And their fellow gearheads. [. . .]

As for the death-cheating, it’s still in full throttle. Take the breath-choking opener, for instance, as Dom and a team of dragsters attempt to hijack the gasoline cargo of a speeding truck. We can practically see oblivion in special-effect relief as a derailed tanker flips, pirouettes in balletic slow motion and hurtles toward Diesel. [. . .]

What blows our lizard brains is the possibility of fiery destruction—this subgenre’s equivalent of the money shot. If that somersaulting tanker hits Diesel in his juiced-up car, the explosion’s going to shoot out like a nuclear geyser. And if Dom and Brian wipe out in those crowded streets, well, boom baby boom! [. . .] So long as the filmmakers keep giving us vicarious access to the good, fast, sleek things in life, we don’t see this ride running out of fuel for a long time.

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There's no "it's all very silly" or "it's a tween male fantasy" or "I'm embarrassed to say I kind of enjoyed it, for what it is." No sir. Not to say that there's no review like that, but there are reviews like this as well.

What I like about Desson's review (and I can call him Desson because we've emailed) is that it is exuberant and that it focuses on the positive. And by "positive" I don't mean sunshine and rainbows. I mean it in the sense of bas-relief: You look at what IS there, and you acknowledge that what is not there (the negative space, what has been left out or carved away) is what makes the positive possible.
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