Fast & Furious Trailer Teaches Lesson About Gas Hauling

The trailer for Fast & Furious, the streamline-titled fourth installment in the zippy-brightly-colored-car franchise that helped Vin Diesel and especially Paul Walker eat and dress well, is a slick, well-pitched thing, even if its turbo-charged automotive shenanigans seem a little bit wince-inducing and bone-rattling after my own unnerving dance with vehicular mayhem on I-405 tonight. Sure, the moving hijacking of a “gasoline land train” in the Dominican Republic (“street value: $1.4 million”) is totally absurd and over-the-top, especially when one considers that apparently the driver of said vehicle is given only a prop-store pistol for self-defense, but this series has never been particularly concerned with subtlety or reality. Ergo, gingham-clad cholos will rejoice, among other twenty- and early thirtysomethings.

Coming home from Tokyo, the fourth movie’s tagline — “New Model, Original Parts” — is representative of Hollywood studio-think at its best, and summons to mind those few times when your parents completely yielded to all the pressures of juggling work and family life and just let you eat McDonald’s and a fifth of a pound of Oreos for dinner. For more on the film, which bows April 3 from Universal, despite the “this summer” tag in its trailer, click here.