116 0402 SCUPStraight ScoopBy John Pearley Huffman
Top 10 ListDumb Things to Look for in 2 Fast 2 Furious[Photos 116-0402.SCUP 1, scan of DVD cover TK from Sport Compact Car]As sequels go, 2 Fast 2 Furious at least cleared the low bar of not being worse than the original The Fast & The Furious. Was it better than the The Fast & The Furious? That would be pushing it. So it's not a good movie by any critical standard, but at least Universal Pictures has to be happy with the $127 million it brought in the U.S. alone, and now sales of the DVD (Amazon.com is getting $18.89 a pop) have been brisk.
In a movie bursting with a bizarre take on automotive culture, lame dialogue, unbelievable situations, a thirst for mayhem, and a casual disregard for death, what are the lines of dialogue and situations we here at Car Craft cherish most? Here are ten of the lamest moments with the time when they appear on the DVD.
Oh yeah, the best moment? That's 31:07 (31 minutes, 7 seconds) into the film.
1. 02:41-"Either you find a fourth or you don't race." Race organizer Tej announces a rule never before enforced at any street race.
2. 06:31-"Damn, Suki. Uh, when you gonna pop my clutch, huh?" That's Tej saying the most ridiculous seduction line in the history of cinema.
3. 12:59-"Smack that ass!" That's street racer Suki in mid-flight as her Honda S2000 reaches low-earth orbit after jumping a drawbridge. In real life the landing would have been fatal, but who's counting.
4. 15:00-Brian O'Conner flees from the police in his Nissan Skyline GT, but thoughtfully leaves the glowing blue neon undercarriage lighting on.
5. 24:18-"I'm not going back to Barstow!" Words to live by from Roman Pearce.
6. 25:04-"Dang! Where you all confiscate those rims from man?" Roman Pearce correctly using the word "dang."
7. 32:13-"That's the Brian O'Conner school of driving right there, baby." Said while driving backwards on a freeway at 70 mph indicating that his Mitsubishi Evo VII had a rather tall Reverse gear.
8. 43:11-"The D.I.S. box, the engine management system ... hell, the main harness. The G.P.S. is spidered into all of that." That's master mechanic Jimmy spewing the largest chunk of technical gobbledygook ever uttered outside of a Star Trek episode.
9. 48:25-"All right, check it out. There's no way we're gonna beat these guys straight up. The Hemi is puttin' out about 425 and that Yenko will snap a speed on about 5 seconds flat. We're gonna pull somthin' out of our ass." Brian O'Conner is probably referring to the same place they pulled this dialogue.
10. 1:11:25-"Hey man, this thing's clean." Brian O'Conner expresses his admiration for the Yenko without noting that the left header is disconnected from the rest of the exhaust system.
Race Car Of The MonthThe Parnelli Jones and Bill Stroppe "Big Oly" Bronco[Photos 116-0402.SCUP 3 color transparency]Off-road racing was a purely funky affair in the '60s and early '70s. Drivers would enter everything from crusted-over Edsels to motorhomes in races like the Baja 1000, and the winners would often be driving some homebuilt contraption that appeared cobbled from plumbing supplies, duct tape, and improvisational engineering. Then came the Big Oly Bronco-a real race machine that revolutionized off-roading.Parnelli Jones, whose storied driving career includes winning the '63 Indy 500, had been introduced to off-road racing during the late '60s but found the stock-based, four-wheel drive vehicles of the time didn't respond to his aggressive driving style. So, enrolling fabricators at Bill Stroppe's Long Beach, California, race facility, he decided to build a two-wheel-drive tube-frame '69 Ford Bronco that could, it was hoped, even beat the motorcycles.