BETTER LIVING THROUGH NETFLIX, VOL. 10: FIND ME GUILTY

Vincenzo Gasolina and Tyrion Lannister. Boosh.

With a handful of notable exceptions, Sidney Lumet's career as a director was characterized by his tendency to make very good movies that it never occurred to anyone to watch. This, to be clear, was never Mr. Lumet's fault. (Well, almost never: Q&A was terrible.) It was merely a function of his valuing character and story over all else, his refusal to (intentionally) lean on melodrama for cheap effect, and—maybe most important—the humility with which he carried himself personally. If you want people running around sucking your dick about what a genius you are, you need to plant the seeds by acting like one. Of course, this can backfire if you aren't one. But Sidney Lumet never seemed to care about that, always talked up the importance of the work above all else and the collaborative nature of the filmmaking process, and as a result he never won a competitive Oscar (he was given an honorary one when he was old, and his speech was pure elegance and class; Sidney Lumet was a men among men, believe) and even among the list of all-time classics he directed, all are associated primarily with their leading actors. His careful preparation, empathy, and humble commitment to the work above his own personal glory (and a number of other things associated with being awesome, surely) led to a vast array of actors giving either the best or one of the best performances of their careers working under Lumet's watch, among them Henry Fonda, Rod Steiger, Al Pacino, William Holden, Faye Dunaway, Paul Newman, River Phoenix, and many many others. So too, in the second-to-last movie Sidney Lumet would ever direct, did Vin Diesel, in Find Me Guilty.

That's right, Vincenzo Gasolina himself. And it's not like “oh, sure, wow, he turned in a better performance than The Fast and the Furious, xXx, and The fuckin' Pacifier, big whoop.” Vincenzo's amaaaaazing in Find Me Guilty. He's out of his mind good in this. There's a grand total of one moment the entire picture when he's not perfect, and that moment is like two seconds in the Annabella Sciorra scene an hour or so in, even then it's just a moment of his composure cracking because he doesn't know what to do with his hands, and even then it's something you can rationalize as “well, maybe it's not that Vin doesn't know what to do with his hands, maybe it's Jackie” except, sorry, it is Vin. But that's okay. The whole rest of the picture Vincenzo's in this fucking wig looking like Jerry Orbach except radiating Movie Star, and it's like “Holy shit, Vincenzo has star power even when he's not flexing his guns driving two hundred miles an hour doing sex with Asia Argento?” If ever there was a moment for Sidney Lumet to pop his collar and be like “Oh yes that's right, y'all,” it's this. Making Robert Duvall look good is one thing. Making Vincenzo Gasolina look like something other than a guy who throws grenades by flexing his biceps is another matter entirely. It's not that Lumet waved a magic wand and turned Vincenzo into a good actor, it's that he knew enough about what acting actually is and was forward-thinking enough to say “I'm going to make a picture with Vin Diesel playing the lead where nothing blows up and he never drives a car.” And he did. And it's a massive amount of fun.

Based on a true story (and purporting to consist to great degree of actual court transcriptions), Find Me Guilty is the story of Jackie DiNorscio (Vincenzo), a wiseguy from the Dirty Jerz whose fuckhead cousin tries to clip him, unsuccessfully. Once he recovers, Jackie's luck takes another turn for the shitty when he gets pinched trying to buy a suitcase full of coke from an undercover cop. Not to mention, he has racketeering charges hanging over him. The US Attorney's office (represented by oily Linus Roache, who did an NY/NJ area accent so well I had to check who he was, only to be like “Holy balls, that's Linus Roache?”) swoops in and offers Jackie a deal if he rolls over on The Boys, only Jackie's a stand-up guy and won't hold with such rubbish. He tells the US Attorney, “Hey, you got a brother? Fuck him, too.” And thus Jackie and practically everybody he knows and has worked with go on trial.

The trial, a massive clusterfuck (it would go on to be the longest criminal trial in American history), is the bulk of the movie. Judge Sidney Finestein (Ron Silver, who is pick-your-jaw-up-off-the-fuckin-floor great in this, in a reminder of how great he could be when not simply noshing on scenery in an exploitation movie for a paycheck) does his best to keep all twenty-something defendants and their respective lawyers (the de facto leader of whom is played by the mighty Peter Dinklage, who rules beyond the capacity of the English language to describe) in line. And he'd have done so perfectly if not for the monkey wrench of Jackie deciding to defend himself. Jackie's wildly inappropriate, blithely ignorant of proper procedure, yet charming debut as defense counsel completely overwhelms the entire trial.

Storywise, that's all there is to Find Me Guilty. The narrative has occasional telling-rather-than-showing problems with conveying the massive amount of time over which the trial took place, and despite being based on a true story elements of it are really, really farfetched. It's the kind of material that in the hands of anyone other than an absolute master—and I really think it's time we start putting Lumet in with the all-time greats, if we aren't already—would be ridiculous nonsense. But in Lumet's hands, it's a delightful bit of entertainment.

Beyond the performances, which are simply tremendous, with countless beautiful little human moments, Lumet's direction is pristine classicism, with meticulous framing, long takes, actual medium and long shots that aren't either establishing shots or panoramic landscapes, and invisible edits. In spite of this it never feels conservative, or an example of a relic of a bygone era clinging to an outmoded way of working because it's all he knows. I feel like kicking myself in the balls for even suggesting such a thing. No, this is a director who trusts his actors to be all the flash and dash the picture needs. That trust derives from careful preparation, years of experience, and the confidence those combine to create. Maybe the result only seems so good because no one makes classical American cinema anymore, but it's still a wonderful little movie.

It's a movie that's been done wrong by history, too. Due to one of the absolute worst marketing campaigns in the history of human endeavor—like, “Kilgore Trout's SF appearing in porno magazines” level bad marketing—Find Me Guilty was gone from theaters before anyone knew it had come out, and was a non-factor in 2006's Oscar race, which I mean yeah I know, “Oscars? blow me,” but imagine if Harvey Weinstein is running the picture's campaign. Suddenly we've got Sidney Lumet going up against Marty Scorsese for Best Director, with both of them trying for their first. You've got Vincenzo getting a nom against Forest Whitaker; I mean, Forest Whitaker still would have won, but then we get the Fast and Furious trailer hailing “ACADEMY AWARD NOMINEE VIN DIESEL.....and paul walker” a couple years later, which would have been considerably lulzier than Vincenzo returning to the franchise having failed elsewhere.

Anyway. Fuck the business. Find Me Guilty still exists, and can be watched. And I'm here to say, with all the authority given a random asshole on the internet with Proustian Tourette's that it goddamn well should be. So there. At the very least, people fiending for a Game of Thrones fix should watch this to get a hit of some Dinklage. Or if you feel like winning a bet with a friend of yours who refuses to believe that Vin Diesel could ever look like Jerry Orbach. Or, if you just want to plain want to see a good movie. Sidney Lumet was the truth, ladies and gentlemen. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God.

"GO H.A.M. OR GO HOME": WHY THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS SERIES IS THE GREATEST THING IN THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE

The antihero occupies a very special place in America's heart. Sure, we claim to be all about the guy in the white hat, and the stereotypical American to many is a meathead incapable of processing nuance, but we're really drawn to moral ambiguity. This addresses a number of programming issues in America's code from its origins (a democratic republic with unprecedented civil liberties for all enfranchised citizens . . . but only dudes had the franchise and half the country's economy depended on slavery to function; that's some moral ambiguity for your ass) to its mythic adolescence (outlaws and gunfighters, many of whom were little more than psychopathic murderers, were folk heroes in the Old West) to its early adulthood (gangsters fascinated us throughout the 20th century), to the modern day, where many kinds of transgressive behavior are thought of fondly, romantically, titilating in their forbiddenness. The concept of the victimless crime is one man's rationalization, another's justification for cathartic desire to be just that little bit bad. The very word “bad” means “good” in certain contexts. And this, of course, leads us to Dominic Toretto, the charismatic axis of the Fast and the Furious series.

Of course, a biiiiiiig part of Toretto's charisma is the fact that he's played by the incomparable Vincenzo Gasolina, whose talents—having big muscles and a voice so low-pitched at moments it can only be described as the “Vin Diesel octave,” not to mention an ability to make women go “holy Jesus I want to fuck the shit out of this guy but I have no idea why” (though many of them know exactly why)—fit the character so perfectly that it's hard to tell sometimes where Vincenzo ends and Dominic begins. And really, it doesn't fucking matter.

I saw Fast Five yesterday, which consists largely of Vincenzo's dick dragging the ground, when he isn't bludgeoning bad guys—or The Rock, who also appears—with it, or using it to shift his insanely customized Dodge Charger into “fuck you” gear. The movie is fucking great. This whole series is one of the great pleasant surprises in popular culture: an ongoing movie series where each installment builds on the already existing story, that delivers the goods without pandering, is executed with great skill, and unites moviegoers of all ages, genders, races, and levels of cineastic foofery in smiling very wide and going “Wow, that fucking owned.”

It was not always thus. I saw the first movie on cable once, maybe 2003 or 4 or something like that and enjoyed it, but didn't really think one way or the other of it once it was done. I was already an avowed Vincenzo fan, and Rick Yune was fucking great as the villain and everything, and Paul Walker did the whole tango with moral ambiguity fairly gracefully, and the car stunts were rad, and the girls were hot . . . I mean, I enjoyed it. It was just a busy time, I guess, and in any case whenever I needed a Vincenzo fix I had xXx on DVD.

Years later, I was having one of many squabbles with an ex-girlfriend about what movie to watch (I can be undiplomatic, and she could be a bit insular; c'est l'amour, entre les immatures) which she won, and we sat down to watch The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. About thirty seconds in I totally forgot my objections to watching it and succumbed to its wiles.

What made Tokyo Drift so much fun was director Justin Lin's self-aware sense of humor about the kind of picture he was making, and ability to imbue the entire picture with a crooked smile and swagger without mocking the movie or its characters. Lin was both smart enough (watch his debut, Better Luck Tomorrow, for evidence) and a good enough director (see previous) to make a movie that is less “brainless escapism” than “viscerally stimulating.” The plot is simple, the characters similarly so, and you know the good guys are going to win in the end, but the picture is well executed, its attitude toward multiculturalism is refreshing and subtly, matter-of-factly conveyed, and most importantly, it has a massively fucking on-point sense of what's cool.

While the fact that neither Lucas Black's gaijin-in-Japan nor Bow Wow's motormouthed sidekick to same are annoying is cool enough, neither can hold a candle to Sung Kang as Han Lue (the same name as his apparently unrelated character in Better Luck Tomorrow). Han is a thinking man's badass: lounging upside shiny, expensive, ludicrously fast cars, surrounded by shiny, expensive, ludicrously fast women, rarely smiling because, well, shit, that'd take effort but also—as we find out over the course of the picture—he's haunted by his past and despite what lazy Westerners might think, as a Korean he's just as much an outsider in Tokyo as Lucas Black and Bow Wow (these fine “we don't all look alike, motherfucker” distinctions come from having a Taiwanese director in the driver's seat).

Then there are those car stunts. Now keep in mind, I'm not saying this as a bad thing at all—especially in light of the horrible fuckin shit Japan's dealing with these days—but they do love really strange, dangerous things that look awesome, and “drifting” qualifies as all three. Lucas Black shows up in Japan, having basically been kicked out of the United States for LARPing Smokey and the Bandit, thinking “yeah, I'm badass.” Drifting is a whole other ballgame, though, as he soon finds out, and he successfully masters this exotic discipline, leading to some fucking dope car chases, though one of them unfortunately kills Han. (Ed. Note: actually, in light of certain other “deaths” in the series, there's a chance Han made it out of the flaming wreck and there's some awesome explanation why).

Next step was watching The Fast and the Furious again on cable and finding it to be fucking rad, if lacking Justin Lin's directorial flair (Rob Cohen is possessed of a little less subtlety, but that's what makes xXx so magnificent). I even went as far as to watch the second picture, 2 Fast 2 Furious, which despite its many charms (Ludacris, Tyrese and especially Eva Mendes are all massive goddamn fun in it) does, sadly, suffer from a lack of Vincenzo (whose cameo at the end of Tokyo Drift was fucking killer). Still, 2 Fast 2 Furious benefits as the latter three pictures in the series do from having a very talented director at the helm, in this case John Singleton. Like Lin in Tokyo Drift (and, credit where credit's due, Cohen in the first one), Singleton managed to make the interracial friendships plausible, and non-shticky while also not dwelling on them at all; the lack of being beaten over the head with “MESSAGE” makes the message so palatable one doesn't even realize it's there.

This is the best thing about the way race is dealt with in the Fast and the Furious movies: it's not. White, black, East Asian, Latin, undecided (Vincenzo and Jordana Brewster, who fittingly play siblings; their parents must have each been from every continent on Earth), none of it matters in the slightest. All are bonded by their deep and abiding love for cars that go extremely fucking fast. Family is decided by choice, though biological family is still very important.

The fact that Vincenzo and those he regards as family commit crimes only serves to deepen their bond. It sets them apart from society, which fails to recognize Vincenzo and retinue's shared moral code, though it is a legitimate one, if founded on a different set of premises than mainstream society's. Vincenzo may occasionally have to wild on motherfuckers, but not at random and never without justification. This perspective is shared by all his “family” (which includes Sung Kang in Tokyo Drift, of course, as he shows up in the following two, earlier chronologically, movies) and sets them apart not only from civilians but also the bad guys, who are also criminals but ones who behave cruelly and court power for power's sake, rather than as a means to an end.

Now, this may seem a bit high-minded for a series of movies where people drive really fast and blow shit up, but it's all there. It's not spelled out, it's not dwelt on at any length, it's simply as fundamental a fact of life as Vincenzo's muscles. And the fact that if you cross him, Vincenzo Gasolina will fuck you the fuck up. If you're lucky he'll just beat you in a race and take your pink slip.

This is the appeal, in a nutshell of The Fast and the Furious. The title alone is most of the explanation. Americans love cars. Shit, everyone loves cars. Driving really fast ranks in very exalted company in the “most fun things to do with your clothes on” category. Speaking of clothes staying on, that's another reason for the popularity of the series: the relatively chaste PG-13 sexuality. People might get pregnant (Jordana Brewster in Fast Five), but the conception happens off-screen. Men may leer at women (who may be randomly making out with each other for no reason) but those women are always clothed. This is another example, and possibly the weirdest, of the Fast and the Furious series getting to have it both ways: the sex is never repressed, but never so open that it'd offend.

As much fun as the first three pictures (especially Tokyo Drift) are, this really became a series with Justin Lin's follow-up Fast and Furious, where—as hinted in the final scene of Tokyo Drift—Vincenzo is back. And is he ever.


Fast and Furious is a prequel to Tokyo Drift, as evidenced by the fact that Han is still alive. It opens with Vincenzo, Han, Michelle Rodriguez, Tego Calderon and Don Omar pulling a rip and run on a fucking oil tanker in the Dominican Republic (one love Wages of Fear/Sorcerer! What's good?) in a simply goddamn tremendous opening sequence. The car stunts are shot and cut as well as anything outside the Mad Max pictures, and if you can keep up with Australians in anything involving ripshit insanity, you deserve a salute. (Ed. Note: that assessment of Australians as ripshit insane people is tendered with love, respect, and awe, FYI).

We then discover that Paul Walker has somehow managed to not get fired by the FBI yet, and he's hot on Vincenzo's case at the behest of superior Shea Whigham (one of the modern cinema's most underrated Evil White Guys in Suits, but not for long if he keeps owning at it like this). After the bad guys kill Michelle Rodriguez—in a truly surprising twist—Vincenzo returns to the US with an even more menacing glower and a growl an octave lower than the Vin Diesel Octave (the scariest aspect of his quest for revenge), and because it's a Fast and the Furious movie, Paul Walker and Vincenzo end up both trying to infiltrate the bad guy's elite squadron of superfast drivers.

Some people checked out at this point, claiming (heretically) that this was retarded. These people, after they go fuck themselves, are advised to recall the prime directive of the Fast and the Furious universe is “All Else Is Secondary to Driving Incredibly Fucking Fast.” You might as well say the Harry Potter movies are retarded because people use magic. If the villain didn't need people to drive incredibly fucking fast, there would be no movie. So yes, Paul Walker and Vincenzo need to race cars against a couple loudmothed retards under the foolish misconception that the race will end in any way other than Vincenzo and Paul Walker within a tenth of a second of each other. What purpose does this serve? Fuck you, that's what purpose it serves.

The bad guy responsible for all this shit is John Ortiz. Civilians may not have that name on the tip of their tongues, so as a reminder, he played Jose Yero in the movie version of Miami Vice (a picture of which no blasphemy be spoken, ever, lest Godmother Manohla Dargis be forced to send me to break your fucking legs). John Ortiz achieved godhood in that picture with his stylized readings of lines like “maybe we could grab a bite,” pronouncing the latter part like “grabbabiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiite.” He's one of those guys who'd been doing theater for a million years in New York and suddenly started getting cast in above-average roles as the drug dealer/villain guy. This is a rough thing for a lot of Latin actors, as once upon a time, those were the only roles they could get, but Ortiz's apparent approach—jump in with both feet and use the caricature of the over-acted bad guy as a means of redeeming the stereotype and turning it on itself—is not only not that hard to rationalize as a positive artistic statement, but a lot of fun to watch. He always looks like he's having fucking huge amounts of fun playing those roles, and it's just as fun for the audience when they see clips of him actually talking and he's totally just a New Yorker (this shouldn't be underestimated as a factor in my enjoyment of his acting, being a New Yorker myself).

It's paradoxically totally obvious that John Ortiz is actually the real bad guy instead of just the front man and handled so well by Justin Lin and screenwriter Chris Morgan that even though it's not a surprise it feels like one. There's also the fact of his mano derecha, Fenix, being not only a lousy speller but the guy who killed Michelle Rodriguez, meaning that Vincenzo has to fuck him up. This is something no rational being would want visited upon himself, and proof that Dark Helmet had it backwards in Spaceballs when he said “[e]vil will always triumph because good . . . is dumb.” Fuckin villains, always with the hubris.

Part of Vincenzo's larger-than-life (and even larger, amazingly, than his muscles) outlaw mystique is that he totally has to be arrested at the end of the picture, and they send his ass to the clink for life—I mean holy fucking shit at this point Vincenzo is basically a character in a fucking folk song—before Paul Walker proves that he's finally come over to the “good” side by leading a daring raid alongside Jordana Brewster and two of the biggest stars in reggaeton (Ed. Note: when staging a prison break, the fact that you would think to make sure the soundtrack is tight is an indication of the highest motherfucking level of style). Like Tokyo Drift, it points the way to the obligatory sequel, but in such a way that makes you totally want to see the sequel. But even in this, admittedly awesome, regard Fast and Furious can't hold a candle to . . .


Fast Five is, thus far—there are two further sequels in the works, according to both Vincenzo and Justin Lin—the culmination of everything the series has come to be: a refutation of every apparently fucktarded thing about it. It's a movie that only exists because of the car stunts? Yeah, but those car stunts are fucking awesome. It's got a simple, derivative plot that coasts on its actors' charisma and chemistry? Yeah, but that charisma lends greater resonance to the pulp plot and eventually (shockingly) coheres into a compelling pulp supernarrative that poses a profound question about what it truly means to be an outlaw. It's verging on the “more is better” conundrum of adding apparently unnecessary elements (in this case, having The Rock be the elite Fed after Vincenzo et al)? Yeah, but The Rock fucking owns in this, to the degree that calling him Dwayne Johnson, as he's billed, doesn't really do him proper justice, whether that's his own name or not.

Fast Five opens with a brilliantly concise, perfectly tuned recap of where the previous picture left off, with Paul Walker and everybody springing Vincenzo from custody. We then pick up with happy couple Paul Walker and Jordana Brewster (having gotten Vincenzo's grudging approval in the last movie) heading down to Rio in the midst of lean times (to top it all off, she's preggers), when they run into one of the dudes from the first movie, Matt Schultze, who's living in Rio with his wife and young kid in the middle of the set of City of God (Fast Five being under the impression that there are three places in Rio de Janeiro: the statue of Jesus, the favelas, and a couple blocks along the beach that look like Miami; this isn't a flaw or anything, pretty much the only parts of Rio where they have enough guns and illegally modded cars to hang out in a Fast and the Furious movie are the favelas). The moment Matt Schultze mentions that he's got a line on a job, stealing a couple high-end cars, everyone in the audience goes “YES! CARS! FUCK! GO!” and Paul Walker and Jordana Brewster are like “awwwwwww yeeeeeahhh.”

Turns out the cars they're stealing have been impounded by the DEA and the doodz who threw Matt Schultze the job are baddies in the employ of one Hernan Reyes (Joaquim de Almeida, one of South America's finest villainous character actors), who, because this is a Fast and the Furious movie is the ONE GUY who controls all of organized crime in Rio and maybe all of Brazil (somewhere Lil' Ze and Knockout Ned are rolling their eyes, sighing, and muttering “Se apenas fosse esse o caso . . .”)

Vincenzo—who joins the job by swaggering on screen in one of the greatest fucking intros ever—and Paul Walker send Jordana Brewster off with one of the cars and stay behind to kill the bad guys and do extremely well-edited things with cars. Only problem is, the bad guys kill some DEA agents (for which Vincenzo and Paul Walker take the blame) and Joaquim de Almeida and his dudes capture Vincenzo and Paul Walker, who are unimpressed. After JDA monologues at them and leaves the room, Vincenzo and Paul Walker escape, having learned that JDA is looking for something in the car Jordana Brewster fucked off with.

They discover that what JDA's after is a chip that, conveniently, has every byte of data about JDA's illegal activities (which calls to mind Stringer Bell's classic rhetorical ode to forethought and caution: “Nigga, is you takin notes on a criminal fuckin conspiracy?”) But before they can get too comfortable figuring out what to do next, a challenger appears, hopping off a plane from sweet home Estados Unidos with about a half a dozen dudes who between them have exhausted the Western hemisphere's anabolic steroid supply. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you The Rock:

“Alright, listen up. The men we're after are professional runners. We find them; we take them as a team and we bring them back. And above all else, we never ever let them get into cars.”

This is a clear indication that ol' Rocky's been beefing up his intellect along with his biceps: as a rational man he knows that if you get Vincenzo Gasolina get into a car, ownage is a foregone conclusion. Rock liaises with the local cops, who are choads and furthermore in JDA's pocket (the exception to both is Rock's knuckle-gnawingly hot translator, who joined the force to avenge her cop husband's death and is subsequently the only honest cop on the Rio PD), and tries to stage a nice, clean raid to bring in Vincenzo except JDA's thugs fuck everything up and the good guys get away after a rooftop chase scene that's almost as cool as the one in District B13 (but neither Vincenzo, Jordana Brewster, nor Paul Walker, alas, are as limber as David Belle).

Vincenzo, whose balls have a gravity well, decides that the thing to do, with every cop and gangster in a notoriously violent country after him, is to rob JDA of over $100 million in cash, which is going to be stored in a state-of-the-art vault inside a fucking police station. Hey, why the fuck not, go H.A.M. or go home, that's what I always say. Paul Walker, in response says, “Good idea, Vincenzo. Let's get every single surviving supporting character from the whole series to help us out.” (Ed. Note: paraphrase) and Vincenzo, in response, expresses his assent in the Vin Diesel Octave.

This is how Tyrese, Ludacris (both from 2 Fast 2 Furious), Sung Kang (from Tokyo Drift), Don Omar, Tego Calderon, and the mouth-watering Gal Godot (all from Fast and Furious; and no, the last is an Israeli model-actress, not a high-concept “His Girl Friday written by Samuel Beckett” joke I made when stoned) all end up coming down to Rio to form the world's most tuneful, most decorative, most speeding-ticketed heist team. They get to work and put together a plan that requires awe-inspiring balls, fancy driving, and a couple brief variances in the laws of physics to pull off, but these formulate the trinity of the Fast and Furious universe, thus making it the perfect plan.

Fate intervenes in the form of excessive competence on the part of The Rock—who is quite fucking badass in this, and just about the only worthy police adversary left for Vincenzo—who totally busts Vincenzo (after Vincenzo beats the fucking shit out of him in a fight scene that's actually kind of scary) and Paul Walker, only to have JDA's doodz show up and ambush them, killing all The Rock's doodz, leaving he and his translator no choice but to join forces with Vincenzo.

The monkey in the wrench, however, is that Vincenzo is dead set on going through with the heist. Everybody's like, “dude, I know the sun revolves around your balls, but seriously, this is fucking suicide,” but Vincenzo's hearing none of it. Until a very manly voice chimes in:

“I'm in.”

Dwayne motherfucking Johnson, reporting for duty. This moment was sufficiently awesome to elicit an almost awed “WORD!” from the gentleman sitting next to me (Ed. Note: this was an afternoon show on a Monday and the theater was fucking packed. This one ain't stoppin with the $86 mil opening weekend folks, this picture's gonna make a lotta money) and an immediate change of heart from Mr. Paul Walker and subsequently everyone else in the room. I mean, this one's a no-brainer. Following Vincenzo into battle is one thing; sure, you still follow him but he's the kinda guy who might get killed in a movie someday, he just has that Beowulf/Beat Takeshi/existential roid-martyr vibe, know'm sayin? But Vincenzo AND The Rock? Fuck outta here, you might kill one of them but you couldn't kill both of them without Arnold Schwarzenegger and even then you'd need twelve movies.

So our outlaw squadron swaggers into the breach and totally fucking house JDA's vault. Every cop in Brazil pursues, including JDA and his mão direita. Vincenzo and Paul Walker drag the vault behind their two heavily reinforced, awesomely fast cars through the streets of Rio; naturally, lots of shit gets destroyed (including, to Jordana Brewster's great amusement back at the command center, a bank), but because they're the good guys (and somehow this is justified through their driving ability; don't ask me how, it just is, and legitimately, no less) no innocent bystanders get killed.

As the terrific chase sequence draws to a conclusion, Vincenzo has one last “fuck this, I'm going to take one for the team” moment, and goes and plays chicken with JDA, using the vault like it's his car's tail to destroy cop and bad guy cars, concluding with JDA's. Paul Walker, because he's got Vincenzo's back til the end, shoots JDA's mão direita. The Rock and his translator drive up, and Rock passes JDA's broken, mumbling form on the ground. Rather than any big dramatic “YOU BETRAYED ME!” histrionics out of Mr. Johnson, he just puts two in JDA's head as he walks past like it ain't even a thing (a move that elicited a “HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO SHITTTTT!!!!!!!!” from the audience). Rock then pulls some straight up Western shit on Vincenzo: the old “I'm keeping the vault, I'm still gonna chase you, and I'll be coming for you in 24 hours” routine, where it's heavily wink-wink-nudge-nudged that you get the fuck out of Dodge, as when I come for you in 24 hours and you're not there I guess it's God's will or something. THIS IS HOW MEN DO THINGS. Naturally, Vincenzo and team have pulled a switcheroo and made off with the $100 mil, and vanish into thin air, and Rock smiles: “Yes, Vincenzo, you are a worthy adversary.” The whole “two sides of the same coin” thing between cop and crook is as old as time, but never has it been executed with such large muscles as it is here. The team-up of Vincenzo and The Rock could not have gone better, in any possible universe.

Then, during the credits, a surprise scene. First, Eva Mendes is back! Looking muy caliente, by the way. She walks into Rock's office at The Government and tells him, I got somethin' for ya. She hands Rock a dossier . . . HOLY FUCKING FUCK MICHELLE RODRIGUEZ IS STILL ALIVE IN GERMANY! Stay tuned for The Fast and the Furious Part Six! HELL yes.


This series defies every typical expectation for a movie franchise. Starting with a not-bad but unremarkable crime picture with a vivid, palpable obsession with cars, it's become—and yes, I'm serious—an epic pulp narrative that defines a very real aspect of our time: a plausibly post-racial, international society of adrenaline addicts who don't take orders from The Man. They believe in nothing but each other and the moment, living their lives, as Vincenzo says in the first movie: “a quarter mile at a time.” These movies are fast. They're furious. They're fucking awesome.

THE VACANT THRONE

Traditionally, when a king would die without an heir, various aspirants would get out swords and start assassinating each other until one was sitting on a throne trying to find serfs to mop up all the blood. While messy, this method of figuring out who was in charge had the distinct advantage of being completely unambiguous. You always knew who was king, and he'd stay king until someone better at sword fighting came along.

At the dawn of the 21st century, most power struggles were settled less violently, although one in particular—involving violence—was in desperate need of resolution. Arnold Schwarzenegger, once a behemoth the likes of which action cinema had never before seen (and probably will never see again), was in decline. By 2000, Arnold had not made a good movie in over half a decade. The action movie had evolved into a medium populated by real actors. Large men with muscles suddenly found themselves facing cinematic obsolescence, not that most large men with muscles know what those words mean, but still. The situation was fucking dire, my friends. Tom Cruise (Tom fucking Cruise!) was what passed for an action star. A man who could not, by a blind man, be described as either large or muscular.

Enter Vin Diesel. Born Vincenzo Gasolina in a small weightlifting village in southern Sicily, Diesel arrived in America, discovered the aesthetic value of the shaved head, and supported himself as a bouncer while patiently awaiting movie stardom. The road was not without obstacles. Steven Spielberg allegedly cast Vincenzo in Saving Private Ryan, although no one remembers anything about that movie except the jaw-dropping D-Day sequence, the fucktarded script, Barry Pepper quoting scripture, Tom Hanks liking Edith Piaf, and the scene when the Nazi slowly and quietly disembowels Adam Goldberg, so Vincenzo's claims to be in it cannot be verified. Then came Pitch Black, a good movie, about as close to low-budget SF and hard SF as we've seen on a movie screen in some time . . . the only problem is “we” consists of me and those four other people who smoked weed to it. Fortunately, one of those other four people was Rob Cohen, who put Vincenzo in The Fast and the Furious. The Fast and the Furious was fun, but not reeeeeeally an action movie, though the car stunts are fun, and Vincenzo was certainly sufficiently muscular. Action movie or no, it was nonetheless a big enough success to lead to Vincenzo's first legitimate campaign for the throne: xXx.

Released in the summer of 2002, xXx could not have been timed better. The power vacuum in the realm of Big, Dumb Movies Where Shit Blows Up had reached a point where the vacuum was threatening to create a singularity that would kill us all. We needed a movie that was big, that was kind of dumb (but not too dumb), and where a whole lot of shit blew the fuck up. We needed a guy who wasn't really that great an actor, with large muscles, to star in this movie. And goddammit we needed it right then.

Behold the glory that is xXx: we open with a man in a tuxedo being chased around what looks like (and is) Prague. Some scruffy dudes with guns are chasing him, but he shows some James Bond moves, and eludes the scruffy dudes . . . but in so doing ends up in the middle of a Rammstein concert. The man in the tuxedo finds himself out of his element to a profound degree, attempting to make his way through the fornicating teenagers, to hear himself think over the sounds of men painted silver breathing fire in German. These attempts are all for naught: the bad guys kill him, and that's that.

Back in the ol' U S of A, a heavily scarred Samuel L. Jackson makes his way into a top-secret intelligence agency HQ, and states his theory that continuing to use operatives like the man in the tuxedo to bring down the anarchist “punks” (now you know better than to go to metal concerts if you're a real punk, young man; if I ever catch you doing that again, go right to your room with no heroin) is bound to end in failure. Samuel L. proposes that they send in low-lives, greaseballs, fuckfaces, shitheads. People, in short, like one Vincenzo Gasolina, esquire.

Enter Vincenzo, portraying an extreme sports star named Xander Cage (whose neck tattoo, xXx, gives the picture its name). He steals the bright red sports car of a douchebag politician (the rear bumper bears the sticker “Skateboarding Is A Crime!”), rigs it with webcams, and growls an anti-authoritarian diatribe extolling the cultural merit of video games, among other things, before concluding with the piece de resistance of this performance art installation, driving the car off a high bridge, transfiguring it into a flaming wreck, while Vincenzo comfortably bungee-jumps to safety.

(Something subtle that I'm mildly embarrassed that I picked up on: Tony Hawk is Vincenzo's getaway driver for the stunt. Yes, the most famous skateboarder in the world, a man worth millions of dollars from his licensed skateboarding video games, the one “extreme sports” star that civilians can reliably name, this is Vincenzo's getaway driver. That one brief shot of Tony Hawk nervously making sure Vincenzo is in the car before stomping the fucking gas and getting the fuck outta there, more than anything that has yet transpired, firmly establishes Vincenzo as a badass of sufficient degree that badasses we previously thought to be supreme still defer to him.)

Of course, party's at Vincenzo's. A half dozen or so extreme sports dudes show up in cameos, paying tribute to the king, and Vincenzo, it must be said, has sufficient swagger to pull this bit off. It is perfectly plausible that he is the emperor of this realm. He's on top of the world. He has to retain a staff of four to walk stooped over making sure his dick doesn't drag the ground. He's—oh, wow, the power just went out and masked men in black rappelled through the windows with machine guns. Party's over! The masked men knock Vincenzo unconscious.

He comes to in a coffee shop, where Vincenzo, being a smart guy, notices a whole bunch of shit awry. When one of the other coffee shop patrons holds the place up, Vincenzo calmly disarms him and puts his foot in the attempted robber's ass. Samuel L. applauds, revealing that the whole charade was a test to see if Vincenzo had It, which he did. Time for him to be knocked out again, for test #2.

Vincenzo and a bunch of other macho assholes wake up on a plane, which lands and drops them off in what appears to be the middle of nowhere in Colombia. Vincenzo, bored off his balls, is convinced that this is just another test with no consequences, so he surrenders to a Jeep full of heavily armed narcoterrorists. Who take him to a big dirty warehouse-type place, and string him up from the ceiling to await the arrival of Danny Trejo and his machete.

Vincenzo displays little respect for Danny Trejo (which would normally be unseemly for a guy playing his first action lead . . . but Vincenzo passes the real test, to wit, still appearing to have balls while appearing in the same frame as Danny Trejo, another very subtle claim to the throne for our Vincenzo) before experiencing his first moment of fear in the movie when he realizes that Danny Trejo has real blood on his machete. Some quick thinking and athletic display of upper body strength results in Vincenzo killing Danny Trejo and having to make a quick exit.

Helicopters start flying around all over the place, hundreds of dudes with machine guns start yammering in Spanish and chasing Vincenzo, who finds a dirt bike with which he tries to get out. Lots of shit blows up (amen) and Vincenzo's stunt double does a lot of really cool shit with the bike, eventually jumping the outer razor wire fence with a gigantic explosion at his back. All that effort, all for naught: Samuel L. and what appears to be the entire US military sweep in and lock shit down.

Vincenzo is miffed that Samuel L. put him and the other shitheads on the plane into such a dangerous situation. Samuel L. counters with a harsh but fair argument: that all Vincenzo's outlaw web hijinks (it would appear stealing politicians' sports cars was but the tip of the iceberg) would merit a long stay in a federal prison. Cue Samuel L. displaying his nonpareil ability to make utterly retarded, banal text sound awesome through sheer force of Samuel L.ness:

You ever watch lions at the zoo? You can always tell which ones were captured in the wild by the look in their eyes. The wild cat. She remembers running across the plain, the thrill of the hunt. Four hundred pounds of killing fury, locked in a box. But after a while, their eyes start to glaze over, and you can tell their soul has died. The same thing happens to a man. Leavenworth Federal Penetentiary is no joke. They'll take a wild man like you and throw him in solitary just for the fun of it. No more mountains to board, no more oceans to surf. Just a 6-by-8 cell with no window and only a bucket to shit in. You can avoid all of that by doing me this small favor.

Vincenzo reluctantly grants that favor, going to work for the Shadowy Dudes In Suits With A Large Weapons Budget agency for Samuel L. and soon finds himself on a plane to Prague, entrusted with the task of buying a bunch of stolen cars from the Russian bad guy. Vincenzo meets his Prague PD liaison, who foolishly gives Vincenzo some 'tude, before taking him to the bad guy's nightclub.

Upon arrival, Vincenzo wastes no time swaggering right up to the bad guy and earning his trust by ratting out the Prague cop (which he was not expecting) and discovering that one of the main henchmen is a huge extreme sports fan and especially a fan of one Xander Cage, which pleases Vincenzo greatly, and he spends the night happily getting fucked up with the bad guys and pretending that he doesn't want to fuck some Jesus into Asia Argento, the bad guy's financial officer/arm candy.

Pause for brief discourse on what elevates an awesome action movie over the run of the mill. Truly awesome action movies have original touches. The shit blows up in new ways. The cars chase in new ways. The premise is still simplistic, sure, but it doesn't insult your intelligence (Russian anarchists wanting to nuke Prague? Hey, sure. Because at all costs, in the name of Premier Havel WE MUST DEFEND PRAGUE!) And, especially nowadays, the girl needs to be cool. Girls don't come much cooler than Asia Argento. This was a point of contention with the date I took to xXx: she called me sleazy for finding Asia hot, and I called her an uptight yuppie with no taste for the exotic. I didn't bother to get into the “Hey, she's Dario's daughter” aspect, since uptight yuppies don't know shit about Dario, and in any case she stopped talking to me after I called her an uptight yuppie. Not having to talk gave me plenty of time to sigh over Asia. Just having her around at all keeps xXx from being a generic action picture.

Vincenzo uploads a staggering amount of information about the bad guys to the Agency, which leads Samuel L. to renege on his promise that he'd let Vincenzo go after this one op. Turns out, they've never had anyone get in this deep before. Vincenzo, pissed, growls “Next time you want someone to save the world, find someone who likes it the way it is.”

So he hangs out with the baddies a bit more, flirts with Asia a bit more, stages the murder of his Prague cop contact to cement his cover, and tries to convince Samuel L. to not just send in a sweeper team to kill everyone. In this last, Vincenzo (trying to protect Asia) errs greatly, since the Prague cop gets pissed and rats Vincenzo out to the baddies.

Vincenzo discovers that Asia is an undercover as well, and the two of them team up. The baddies find them out, and Vincenzo has to escape an avalanche on snowboard and blow a bunch of cars up. Asia witnesses the cruelty of the villains, who nerve-gas a room full of scientists for the hell of it; the main baddie laughs uproariously as the poor scientists slowly die.

Vincenzo's gadget guy supplies him with a tricked-out muscle car, in which Vincenzo and Asia pursue the boat the baddies have put the nerve gas bomb on; once it gets to downtown Prague, boom. This necessitates fancy driving, very cool stunts, and the requisite “is he dead? Is there any question more disingenuous in this kind of action movie?” moment for a bit of drama before Vincenzo emerges, victorious but wet. He and Asia run away to the South Pacific where they have, the movie implies, the awesomest sex in the history of sex while Samuel L. tries to get Vincenzo's attention for a new mission. Roll credits. Hell yes.

By rights, Vincenzo should have had the inside track to the throne based solely on this role. A challenger appeared the following year, when The Rock made The Rundown, in which Arnold appears as himself in a club, briefly says what's up to The Rock in a clear-cut “I pass the crown to you” moment. Of course, this means war. Or, more accurately, would have meant war if Vincenzo really gave a fuck. The smart move would have been, one more non-xXx picture, maybe a sequel to The Fast and the Furious, get that franchise going, then another xXx movie. Instead, Vincenzo pulls this “I want to be a real actor” fuckology, refuses to do 2 Fast 2 Furious, refuses to a sequel to xXx, and bizarrely does a sequel to Pitch Black, The Chronicles of Riddick (with like twenty times the budget, that tanked because the four of us who saw Pitch Black weren't much of a fan base; Riddick is okay if you're high, but otherwise utterly tarded).

So Vincenzo took himself out of the game, and they went ahead and made a sequel to xXx without him. I was suspicious, and missed it in the theater (along with everyone else: xXx: State of the Union was one of the most expensive flops of all time), but a while later my mom started insisting enthusiastically that it was actually awesome and that I should see it. I did . . . and lo and behold, it's almost as great as the first one is!

I barely even remember the plot to xXx: State of the Union. I know bad guys break into Langley and machine gun all the “good” guy intelligence agency dudes (considering that going Columbine on CIA headquarters after the Iraq clusterfuck had its appeal as a concept, it took a bit of effort to recalibrate my emotional reaction to this opener) and that Samuel L. and the gadget guy decide, in the wake of Xander Cage's death (fatal “I want more money for the sequel than you're willing to pay”-itis) to get the next best thing to Vincenzo: Ice Cube.

Considering that Ice Cube came straight outta Compton, was affiliated with a gang called Niggaz With Attitudes, and that if you fuck with him, the police are gonna have to come get him off your ass, he's called off with a sawed-off, squeezes the trigger and bodies are hauled off, and so on, this choice makes a great deal of sense. We are, after all, talking of a man whose idea of a good day is one where he needn't use his AK. The only problem is, Cube is in a super high maximum security prison, the kind of place that no one has ever escaped from except in a stupid action movie. Samuel L. Jackson takes advantage of a long and storied career having granted him metanarrative powers of perception, and realizes that they're in a stupid action movie, and springs Cube in a sequence that left Cube's stunt man breathing very heavily.

Once Cube is out, he has to stop Willem Defoe from assassinating the president and assuming power in a coup d'etat (because Willem Defoe is fucking old school, motherfucker). Stopping Willem Defoe involves almost shtupping a white chick, enlisting Xzibit's chop shop to make some tanks, carjacking a couple dudes who were unknowingly transporting a shitload of guns, and generally turning Washington DC into a war zone at the climax, where a heavily tanned, lounge lizard president (picture a cross between George Hamilton, J.T. Walsh, and Rudy Giuliani) narrowly escapes getting got due to the razor-sharp eye-hand coordination of Cube's stunt double. After a (no bullshit) thrilling chase sequence aboard a high-speed train in which Cube's stunt double squares the fuck off with Willem Defoe and unceremoniously sends him to the next life, the natural order of the world is restored, Cube is no longer a fugitive (I think . . . he's either still a fugitive or decides to live the life of an anonymous nomad to set up a sequel that never came) and Xzibit's chop-shop girl loves him.

I would never claim that xXx: State of the Union is not utter and complete bullshit. It's really dumb and effects-heavy, but the effects are pretty good, and in the four scenes in the movie where it's really Cube and not his stunt double, Cube is pretty good (especially when he pulls a fully-realized Southern lobbyist character out of his ass in the scene where he almost shtups the white chick, who turns out to be evil). Willem Defoe is good, because he has a magical ability to overact in shitty movies and not look like an asshole (To Live and Die in LA was a notable exception to this, because he was too young and insufficiently leathery), and Xzibit is quite fun, repeating "If it's got wheels, we can jack it," as a mantra; Cube later welcomes him to "the first tank-jacking in history" (they steal a tank at one point) and Xzibit is suitably respectful of the historical significance.

But, in the end, Cube is not Vincenzo Gasolina. Do not, please, misinterpret this as a slight against Cube. The man is a giant, and in the right picture (Boyz N The Hood, Three Kings) is an extremely capable character actor. But there's something about the way Vincenzo swaggered through that first picture, that immortal, untouchable growling godhood, that Cube can never hope to replicate. Cube acts, Vincenzo merely is. It certainly helped that the script to the first movie was better (Vincenzo had the advantage of timeless text like “Stop thinking Prague police, start thinking PlayStation—blow shit up!”) and in scenes where it was unclear whether Vincenzo was staring off into middle distance trying to remember his lines or trying to look worldly, pensive, and alienated, you could look at the other side of the frame and see Prague.

The difference, in the end, between xXx and its sequel is not great in terms of enjoyment, even if it is in quality. For those moods where you're like “I want to see an action movie with balls,” xXx fits the bill perfectly. For those “I want to see something that kind of sucks but will surprise me at how little it actually, in fact, does suck and actually is kind of good when all is said and done” moods, the sequel fits, though that is, admittedly, quite a nuanced mood, and rarer. Extreme care must be taken to not watch xXx: State of the Union in any kind of wistful mood, as an inevitable sighing “what might have been” regarding Vincenzo's failed bid for the throne may take hold.

Vincenzo Gasolina: the once and (probably not) future king. The throne is still vacant, since The Rock is making kids' movies. And The Expendables looks to be replacing the monarchy with a Politburo: who's the alpha badass among Sly, Arnold, Bruce, Statham, Jet, Dolph, Danny Trejo, Terry Crews, Randy Couture, and Steve Austin (Mickey Rourke and Eric Roberts don't count)? We shall see. But we will most likely have to remember kings only in our dreams.