Here at Hecklerspray, we love Vin Diesel, we really do. Maybe it’s because he looks like the love child of a polar bear and Chuch Norris, it could be because his voice can cut through a can of baked beans or perhaps it’s because he has to kiss Michelle Rodriguez so we don’t have to.

One thing it definately isn’t, though, is his choice of films!

 Returning to the Fast and Furious franchise, all the cast seem keen and eager to get back to where they began (i.e. obscurity) and get in on the action(i.e. pay cheque).

Going into the fourth installment (which, sadly, didn’t opt for the title 4 Fast 4 Furious), this is actually a prequel to the previous installment, Tokyo Drift (not that it matters). The main draw here is all the original actors return: Diesel, Paul Walker, Michelle Rodriguez and Jordana Brewster.

Fast and Furious movies come with a few prequisites; firstly we expect fast cars, cinemas full of dribbling ASBOs and impressive stunt work. In fact, we sat down with a few beers and pals to enjoy this latest installment, the way it should be watched.

The film starts off with a bang (in the form of a big CG truck), but before that rolls towards us, we are propelled straight into a moving canyon-path heist. Dom (Diesel) and Letty (Rodriguez) show some skills and throw the audience into an impressive action set-piece, full of vehicle to vehicle jumping, crashes and explosions – not a bad way to get things going!

Sadly, the fun soon slips its foot off of the accelerator. While FBI Agent O’Conner (Walker) even makes a decent entrance in the form of a nifty foot-chase, the fun is short-lived. Dom and O’Connor soon team up again on the trail of a murder, the two then getting back in the fast cars to beat the evil drug dealers (A couple of villains so lacking in any substance, subtitles may as well appear saying ‘booo!’)

The film has about four major action set-pieces, two of which (including the climax) take place in the same uninspired CGI cave – Clarkson would feel shortchanged by the level of cheap-looking, fabricated stunt-sequences contained in this film! It is dissapointing that a film reliant on car-based action, chooses to save money by going down the bluescreen route!

The film becomes a pedestrian trip of lacklustre action, effects and storytelling. The extras on the DVD disc do little to impress either, although, Vin’s Driving School is a highlight, even the gag-reel bores. It appears, for a franchise still with some power under the hood, it seems to be taking direction from a dodgy sat-nav!

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It's outrageous – all Michelle Rodriguez wants to do is find beauty in a jail cell and the sods keep setting her free before she can properly find it.

Although Michelle Rodriguez started her 180-day jail sentence for probation violation just over a fortnight ago, it has been reported that she was last night set free for good behaviour. In total Michelle Rodriguez served just 17 days of her six-month sentence.

Michelle should count herself lucky – one day longer and she'd have had to suffer through a full 10 percent of her sentence. Imagine how hellish that would be.

Remember when Michelle Rodriguez went to jail for six months a couple of days before Christmas? Aside from the fact that it meant policeman could work over Christmas without a lairy mannish-looking woman from the Dominican Republic stumbling up to them and ordering them to put a gun to her fucking head, what do you remember most about it?

Was it, say, that Michelle Rodriguez was found to be ineligible for either work furloughs or house arrest and had to – absolutely had to – serve out the entire six months of her jail sentence, all of it, from beginning to end, with not even a sniff an early release?

Funny that, because that's what we remember about it, too.

Not that anything like that matters, though, because Michelle Rodriguez's 180-day sentence for skipping community service from a previous conviction and drinking with a SCRAM anklet has been cut to just 17 days, and she was released last night. People reports:

Michelle Rodriguez was released from the Lynwood, Calif., jail Wednesday night after serving just 17 days of her 180-day sentence… The 29-year-old actress got out at 7:50 p.m., according to her official web site.

17 days? 17 measly days? That's rubbish. Honestly, what's a decent self-respecting female inmate like Michelle Rodriguez supposed to accomplish in 17 poxy days? That's only enough time to get you a brown belt in shiv-fencing at best, plus it's nowhere near the amount of time that Michelle Rodriguez's body needed to build up an immunity to the biro-ink tattoo performed with a spit-sterilised needle that she was planning to give herself. 

Still, Michelle Rodriguez's early jail release hold an important moral for all of us – if you're going to break the law, then do it in Los Angeles. And it helps if you're the shit one from Lost as well.

Read more:

Michelle Rodriguez Out of Jail – Early! – People 

As a rational human being, the two things you want most for Christmas are to see Return Of BloodRayne and Girlfight 2: Not As Sexy As You'd Think finally get greenlit.

But tough luck, because neither of those things will happen for at least the next half-year – Michelle Rodriguez, the star of those original movies, has just started her six-month jail sentence for constantly being unable to follow simple probation rules. But it's not all bad news, because now she's been locked up in the Century Regional Detention Facility in Los Angeles, Michelle Rodriguez will get to take part in the jail's annual inter-inmate Secret Santa. What will Michelle Rodriguez be given? A bucket of piss? A bucket of poo? A bucket of piss and poo all mixed up? A vigorous stabbing? Oh, how we wish we could take part in Michelle Rodriguez's Secret Santa, too.

Of all the celebrity jail-sentences that have taken place this year, it's heartening to discover that the final celebrity to be locked up in 2007 is Michelle Rodriguez, because she's been in trouble with the law so often that we're taking this new sentence as God's way of telling us that 2008 is going to be just fine.

Not that it's especially new news that Michelle Rodriguez is in jail – she was sentenced to six months back in October – but, well, it's Christmas Eve and so little has actually happened that it's either we tell you about this or we do what all the news programmes have done and try to make out that people going Christmas shopping just before Christmas somehow constitutes a top breaking story. 

So then, Michelle Rodriguez is in jail, but what for? Why, the same old nonsense that she always gets in trouble for – failing to keep her nose clean for long enough to let her probation period pass smoothly. There was a drink-driving arrest, some sort of hit and run, a failure to carry out her community service and consumption of alcohol three times in the period when Rodriguez was wearing a SCRAM anklet, all of which was too much for the judge to bear. So Michelle Rodriguez now has to sit out the full six-month sentence with no early release, no home confinement and no work furlough.

Sounds hellish to us, but Michelle Rodriguez is bound to enjoy it. Last time she was in prison – for a full four-hour stretch in 2006 – Michelle Rodriguez announced that:

"I'm a gypsy. I can see beauty in a jail cell."

So, by treating her sentence as a six-month jail cell beauty-finding expedition, Michelle Rodriguez will focus on the positives and get through her jail term easily. And it's not even as if Michelle Rodriguez's statement was that stupid in the first place – that time Crosseyed Mary The Attempted Murderer wrote 'Kill Me Now' in shit on the wall of the cell that Michelle is about to inherit, holding the turd like a dirty biro, was an awful lot like Van Gogh painting that famous picture of his, or something.

Anyway, Michelle Rodriguez will be spending her time at the Century Regional Detention Facility, which is the same jail that Paris Hilton got to spend three weeks of her time in earlier this year. So who knows, perhaps she'll leave in six months full of the same determination to make the world a better place as Paris did. Maybe she'll even even up getting naked and painting herself gold like Paris, too.

In which case we're taking that comment about God making everything OK for us in 2008 back right now.

Read more:

Michelle Rodriguez begins 6-month jail term - Reuters