Jammer-12

I watched this with a couple of pilot buddies of mine. I'll start with what I liked because the list is quite small.

The flying. Apart from a few shots which were obviously CGI, the rest were actual aircraft actually flying, and the production team did a great job of making them look and sound fantastic. The fact the producers chose to go down that route instead of doing them entirely in CG deserves some credit.

But the list of gross factual errors, bad dialog, silly direction, and holes in what is already a paper thin plot pales in comparison with the bad pacing. For me, the pacing totally ruined any enjoyment I might have received from this film. One of the action scenes in the middle of the film was far better done than the one at the end so the second half of the film felt rather anti-climatic.

I want to start by saying that this film has some beautiful cars in it that were the result of hundreds of hours of hard work. Rob Cohen does them justice with his slick camera work and effects to really bring the cars to life.

However, the film lacks two ingredients to make it a truly great film. Number one, a plausible plot that flows logically. The basic setting of an underground street racing circuit is an excellent place to start, but to simply use a plot that was dangerously similar to Point Break was disappointing. I found the film was way too easy to predict the ending and unlike Point Break they didn't resolve the outcomes for the majority of the ensemble characters. I thought the film needed to be about 15 to 20 minutes longer so that adequate time could be given to fill out certain parts of the film that seemed to jump from a to b without much substance, i.e. the formation of Brian's relationship to the Toretto siblings.

Two, Vin Diesel does the most with a script that struggled to portray all the multiple facets that his characterization of Dominic Toretto possessed, but Paul Walker simply doesn't have the talent as a leading man to carry the film. I thought Jordana Brewster was good and I would have liked to have seen more of Michelle Rodriguez's character as I really enjoyed her outing in Girlfight, but to no avail.

While I have no doubt that the actors are more than capable of doing a lot better than the script allows, we were not allowed to see it.

I really hope that if they make a sequel, they do it properly.

After seeing this movie a couple of times, I'd say it's a rather forgettable film. However, there are some redeeming features. Firstly, the plot (and its subsequent sub-plots) was fairly plausible, and the societal dynamic wasn't as 'squeaky clean' as a lot of other sci fi films these days. The effects overall were fairly good considering the limited budget.

Now the not so good stuff. Poor scripting lead to some very accomplished actors like David Suchet and Jurgen Prochnow appearing very wooden and forced. The editing meant some parts did not flow well at all and instead of building character relationships (particularly between Blair and Devereaux and Marshall and Forbes) it rather glossed over some very important scenes. The 'bullet time' sequence rather than being an effective plot device was made into a 'look at me' effect thrown in at the last minute and was totally superfluous to the film.

This film could have been a very good film if it had been scripted and edited better. In it's current incarnation you spend half the film scratching your head trying to decipher what is going on and the other half looking at your watch.