First released in 1996, Fast Money opens with Francesca March (Yancy Butler) stealing a car.

This is what Francesca does for a living.  She steals cars and she’s good at it.  She’s the type of who can look in any trashcan and find something that she can use to pick a lock.  She’s master at hot-wiring a car.  I personally have no idea how to hot-wire a car but, judging from the movies that I’ve seen, it appears to be the easiest thing in the world to do.  Francesca doesn’t just steal cars for the money.  She sincerely enjoys doing it, to the extent that it’s a compulsion for her.  If she sees a car, she has to steal it.

This has not made her popular with the LAPD.  In fact, an entire taskforce has been set up to stop her.  Realizing that she has to get out of town, she rushes to the airport.  It’s there that she runs into Jack Martin (Matt McCoy), a nerdy journalist who is working on a story that could take down a powerful U.S. Senator.  Jack is looking to catch a flight to Reno.  For reasons that aren’t particularly clear, Francesca rushes up to Jack and pretends to be his wife and the recently widowed Jack goes along with it.

Further complicating matters is that Francesca impulsively decides to seal one last car and the one that she picks just happens to have 3 million dollars in mob money and a bunch of counterfeit printing plates in the trunk.  The evil Sir Stewart (Jacob Witkin) wants his money back and he sends Regy (Trevor Goddard) and corrupt detective Lt. Diego (John Ashton) to track down Francesca and Jack.

Soon, Francesca and Jack are desperately trying reach the Mexican border while dodging corrupt cops, FBI agents, and mobsters.  It leads to a lot of car chases, explosions, helicopters, and shoot-outs.  (The otherwise meek Jack turns out to be a surprising good shot.  Neither he nor Francesca freaks out after he shoots multiple people, which is the sort of thing that I would probably freak out about.)  Francesca and Jack also find themselves falling in love but wondering just how much they can trust each other.  Stolen money does that to people.

Fast Money is a cheerfully dumb but entertainingly fast-paced movie, one in which the chase never stops long enough for the viewer to have too much time to try to figure out why the ultracool Francesa would be willing risk her freedom for a relationship with someone as whiny as Jack.  Yancy Butler plays Francesca as being so confident and so fearless that it’s hard not to admire her but there’s also no way that she seems like she would ever have much use for someone as meek and repressed as Jack, regardless of how deadly his aim might be.  One gets the feeling that the only thing keeping this couple together is the adrenaline rush of being hunted.  If Jack and Francesca do make it to safety, their relationship will probably be over by the end of the week.

Though Fast Money is ultimately a fun but somewhat generic direct-to-video action film, I appreciated the film’s vision of a world where everyone from the mob to the police to the FBI were basically working together to track down one career criminal and one innocent man.  When even the usually likable John Ashton is trying to murder you in a cheap motel, you know you have reached the other side of the looking glass.  Jack learns what Francesca has always understood, which is that one should be suspicious of authority.  Though it may not have been the film’s intent, Fast Money‘s ultimate message becomes, “Trust no one but yourself.”