Don't Worry About It.

I was watching one of the Fast and Furious movies last night. It was late and nothing else was on. It was so bad it was good. It was one of those movies where everyone involved was just there for a paycheck, even though no one in the movie was a star. The biggest “name” was Vin Diesel. He was a star for about twenty minutes five years ago. The writers didn’t care. The script wasn’t even a first draft. It was just some drunken ramblings on a cocktail napkin. The movie starts out with Vin Diesel looking at some skid marks of the crash that killed his girlfriend. He sniffs some of the rubber on the asphalt and identifies it as nitro methane, and apparently only one guy in Los Angeles uses it. I was sitting at my computer so I looked up nitro methane. It’s the base for drag racing fuel. This was my mistake because now I was going to have to watch the whole movie to see just how stupid it would get. Of course Vin Diesel decides he has to get revenge for his girlfriend’s murder, even though “girlfriend” is used loosely. He hadn’t seen her in three years. She stayed in L.A. while he became a truck pirate in Central America – I kid you not. His piracy has him pretty high on the F.B.I. list, even though their jurisdiction doesn’t extend to Central America, so he needs to keep a low profile. He does this by driving up to his old house in South Central Los Angeles in a bright yellow muscle car with three fourths of the chrome engine sticking out of the hood. He pulls into the garage, of his last known address, and starts tinkering with his car – in the middle of the night, with the light on, and the garage door open. His sister, who still lives at this house, shows up with a couple bags of groceries and drops the cliché, “You can’t be here. The Feds are looking for you!” He responds with the deadpan, “Don’t worry about it.” That was the end of that plot point. I watched another half hour, no Feds, no nothing. I glossed over the fact that the biggest truck pirate in Central America still has his sister living in the ghetto. I ignored the notion of a drug cartel looking for drug mules by throwing a block party/drag racing tournament. The only Fed we encounter is the other main character who’s undercover and isn’t after Vin. I now know the secret to avoiding federal prosecution, “Don’t worry about it.” I got offended and went to bed.