I took the time to watch the first ‘Fast and Furious’ movie and that experience cured me forever on these nouveau car chase flicks.
There is no way around the stone cold truth that these new CGI car movies are just a two hour video game where the audience doesn’t have a control stick.
Otherwise they would steer the cars right into the nearest lane of traffic and go out in a fiery fake cartoon crash and look for a game over sign.
What is even more galling is these cartoon car chases have replaced the old school car chase movies in the Top Ten car movie list.
The ‘Fast and Furious’ franchise is now up to its seventh movie with no signs of a imminent slowdown at the box office. Yes we have gotten that stupid because number eight is already on the horizon in 2014.
Personally I believe the producers have designed a preview mechanism for the video games when they make ‘Fast and Furious’ movies. The gullible theater-goers get a two hour look at the newest video game version in the theaters and it gets masqueraded as an actual movie.
Throw a grim-faced Vin Diesel as a lead actor in the cartoon and you have yourself another 21st century version of a car chase movie done very badly and armed with the thinnest plot line since Wile E chased after the Roadrunner-only with more cartoon explosions and crashes.
Basically, my biggest grievance against the new CGI car movies is just that simple: they don’t use real cars and real stunt drivers. Imagine the chase scene from ‘Bullitt’ done with computer animation instead of a real 1968 Mustang and Charger battle on the streets of ‘Frisco.
The idea of CGI ‘Bullitt’ is simply too frightening and sad to comprehend because it would have taken a classic car chase scene performed by real human drivers and placed the entire scene in the hands of some nerd who lives in his parents’ basement and has never even driven a real car.
CGI sucks the joy out of car chases and puts the automobile experience on the same plane as sci-fi starships produced by the same soulless nerds who have replaced real movies with cartoons.
I shudder to think about Kowalski running from the law in his CGI Challenger in a remake of ‘Vanishing Point’. The TV remake of the original ‘Vanishing Point’ was enough to produce instant projectile vomiting in car guys and one can only surmise that a CGI version would completely destroy the will to live for most serious car guys.
I would assume that Kowalski would be played by Vin and he would undoubtedly survive the crash into the two ‘dozers by either flipping the Challenger over them or simply walking away from the fiery crash scene with a grim look on his face.
The ‘Vanishing Point’ franchise would be perpetuated by an endless CGI series of these horrific excuses for car movies and there would be only one redeeming feature in the whole damn thing: No real classic cars would be harmed during the entire filming process.
Jim Sutherland
