Last summer, I went on record stating that Shoot ‘Em Up was and is my all-time favorite guilty pleasure movie. At the start of this year, I ranked Piranha 3D and The A-Team among my favorite films of 2010. Roughly two months ago, I gave Drive Angry a thorough recommendation. These are all mindless action films, high on spectacle and low on brain cells, yet I still found them enjoyable. They still managed to present characters I could root for and delivered action with clear stakes and deliciously over-the-top presentation. None of which can be said for The Fast and the Furious.

I’m not exaggerating when I say that this film lost me within the first five seconds. The opening titles were presented in a way that was obviously meant to be edgy and visually unique, but it came off as illegible and trying too hard to be macho. This is followed by an action scene in which thieves use three Honda Civics to hijack a truck. This isn’t as interesting as it sounds. The stunts weren’t nearly as spectacular as the movie’s reputation would suggest, and getting invested in the holdup was impossible because I had no idea who was doing what or why. It wasn’t until a half-hour later — at the end of the first act — when I had any clue what was going on.

The heist is followed by a scene of Brian O’Connor (Paul Walker) driving a car really fast before looking disappointed for reasons unknown. We then see that he’s been going to the same diner every day to order intentionally crappy food for reasons unknown, just before he gets into a fight with some idiots who were only just introduced. If the film made these characters fight and failed to convey the reason why, that’s bad enough. If the idiots picked a fight just because they were two-dimensional muscleheads, that’s even worse. I’m genuinely not sure which it was.

So, yeah. The screenplay sucks from start to finish. The dialogue is awful, the romance subplot is forced, the characterization is non-existent and no one in the cast is remotely talented enough to salvage a decent performance out of it (though Vin Diesel does come close). Ah, but we didn’t come to this movie for the script, did we? Anyone who came to this movie came for the babes, fast cars and explosions right?

Well, you’re still out of luck.

There’s a car race at the end of the first act, there’s a lot of racing in the third, and a whole lot of nothing in between. That’s right folks: The second act — by its nature, the longest and arguably the most crucial in the film — is entirely bereft of any car action. Instead, we get drama, suspicion and the occasional gunfight amongst our characters. It’s completely boring because A) it isn’t what we came for, B) the characters are so unsympathetic that I couldn’t care what happens to them one way or another, and C) the story is so predictable that what happens to them is never in doubt.

But what about the car chases themselves? Well, the one at the tail end of the first act is kinda crappy. For one thing, there doesn’t seem to be anything at stake except for the characters’ inflated egos, so why should I care? If these characters break the law, damage their outrageously expensive cars and/or get injured for no better reason than their own personal gain, they get no sympathy from me. Furthermore, this car chase frequently uses CGI shots of what’s going on in the car’s machinery during the race. A clever filmmaker might have been able to use these as a way of supplementing the action, but this film uses the technique in a way that distracts from what we really came to see. Either way, it really doesn’t bode well for the film when the races are so lame that they need such tricks to be made exciting. For God’s sake, they’re just driving in a straight line!

In the third act, we see something called “Race Wars” that the whole film has been leading up to, yet we never see Diesel or Walker race here. No, the only two races that happen here are totally predictable bores that happen between some members in the secondary cast. After that, it’s off to another truck robbery, in which I’m expected to root for a sack-of-shit thief that I’ve been led to hate through the entire film instead of an honest truck driver who’s defending himself from a band of hijackers. Fuck that.

I’ll admit that the rest of the car action in the third act is pretty good. It’s undercut by how predictable it is, there are some annoying visual flourishes and the film ends on several disappointing notes with our characters failing to learn a goddamn thing from the prior events. Still, I’ll admit that the stunts (and even a few in that last truck heist) were pretty good.

All in all, this film brought me something I honestly didn’t expect: BOREDOM. The car chasing scenes weren’t exciting or over-the-top enough to hold interest until the very end. The attempts at sex appeal were non-existent at best and flat-out misogynistic at worst. The plot is predictable and paper-thin by design, which makes the motor-less second act all the less bearable. The visuals tried too hard to be edgy, the songs tried too hard to be tough (yeah, “Rollin'” by Limp Bizkit hasn’t aged at all, has it?!) and worst of all, these characters and their actors just weren’t worth spending 100 minutes with.

The Fast and the Furious is worthless. It doesn’t help that the characters and the writing are terrible, but more importantly, there’s nothing in the way of action that hasn’t already been done a hundred times better in at least a dozen other movies. Hell, I could find more genuinely exciting car chase scenes in What’s Up, Doc? or The Blues Brothers!

This movie could only appeal to the film-illiterate who have grown far too comfortable at turning their brains off. How it managed to spawn four fucking sequels, I hope I never know.