My Fast and Furious Marathon
No, I’m not trying to break any records for the 26-mile run.
Since I’ve never seen the Fast and Furious films in any kind of order or totality, I’ve decided to try to remedy that before F9 is released next week (24 June 2021.)
There are nine films released and it seems like they all keep to a fairly strict runtime, with the first four or so films clocking in around the 110-minute mark, and everything beyond that reaching something more like 135 minutes.
For disclosure’s sake, I think my impression of the films is that they’re completely silly. I don’t really know many people who go to watch the series religiously or will go to bat for it in any discussion, so I’m curious to see if this stems from any kind of truthfulness about what the series actually is, or whether it’s just a kind of snobbery on my part.
I understand that the series didn’t start off as bombastic and large-scale as it now seems to be, so I’m also looking to see how they were before this change was made and when it actually occurred. It might also be interesting to do a little research and try to clock exactly why it happened in the first place; whether it was financially motivated, a conscious creative decision or something entirely different.
I’ve got my work cut out for me, then, and with a pretty hectic work rota next week, I’m probably going to struggle a little if I’m to release my normal reviews alongside.
In that case, I should probably get going.
The Fast and the Furious (2001)
3/5
The first film of the Fast saga is basically Point Break but with cars and no Keanu or Swayze.
The film opens with a nighttime heist. Three suped-up Honda Civics swarm a truck barreling down a highway, a make away with its goods. We learn the robbery is one in a string of other similar ones, and LAPD officer Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker) is tasked with infiltrating the suspected crew, led by one Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) with the hopes of taking them down.
In the most noughties way I think I could ever imagine, it’s filled to the brim with street races and homoeroticism masquerading as machismo, and I actually thought The Fast and the Furious was overall pretty slick. In general, I found the absolutely wild visuals pretty engaging to watch, some of the set pieces - as cartoonish as they were - fairly well crafted, with some minor editing mistakes and the relationships actually really compelling.
One scene that stood out was the final heist that takes place after the festival in the desert. Toretto and his crew, hamstrung from the get-go by the absence of their tech-guy Jesse, set out once more in those Civics from earlier. This time, the whole thing takes place during the day and immediately gets off to a rocky start when their lack of numbers means they struggle to keep control over the big rig they’ve targetted. To make things worse, the rather understandably miffed trucker takes things into his own hands and draws a shotgun, firing wildly at the crew in general and the intruder attached to his rig by a grapple-hook, Vince (Matt Schulze), in particular. O'Conner, revealing to his love interest and Dom’s sister, Mia, in the process, calls into dispatch and starts tracking the crew down, hoping to help them out the best he can.
Honestly, it’s a sequence filled with character-based drama and escalates at a thrilling pace, and I will go to bat for this scene, if not the whole movie, against anyone carelessly flinging broad vitriol at the series.
What drags the thing down for me is generally the performances. Walker is pretty weak as a lead and can’t hold the thing up. Diesel is stronger here than I’ve seen him in recent years, but he’s still not particularly interesting beyond what’s been written into the script.
Other than that, I found it pretty interesting that Letty Ortiz, Michelle Rodriguez’ character, is basically just a bit of a badass love interest for Toretto here, considering the clear importance she has in the later films. I wasn’t expecting much, but it’s just a little jarring to see where she started out in the narrative.
Also pretty surprising to see a David Ayer screenwriting credit here.
Just as an added note: the director, Rob Cohen, also appears a little bit of a terrible dude, with numerous allegations of sexual assault and misconduct and various other crimes - which does taint the rampant chauvinism on display here as a little more than just being a bit tacky.
2 Fast 2 Furious (2003)
2/5
For me, 2 Fast 2 Furious started out incredibly strong, I really enjoyed the new setting and I was half hoping the opening street race might be a little bit of backstory to Brian’s character, justifying his position in the LAPD. When I realised, this was just a straight sequel and the rest of the film was literally just going to be a rehash of the The Fast and the Furious in a different setting with different characters, I’ve got to admit I was a little disappointed.
That being said, though Walker is just as weak here, if not a little weaker thanks in no small part to the god awful script - my favourite line of the series, and perhaps even in any film ever, now being “you’re a good driver, man,” followed by the response, “thanks, bro.” It’s just fantastic - the new faces in the cast are a huge bonus for me. Tyrese Gibson as Brian’s old buddy Roman is genius and is absolutely the heart of the film, Ludacris as Tej is also eminently watchable, so I had no complaints having Diesel and the others out of the picture for a film.
The film still has massive issues with its weird relationship to all things masculine - it’s even gayer than the first film, but also still just sees its female characters as hyper-sexualised asides. There’s maybe an argument to be made that Eva Mendes’ Agent Fuentes does help things move along, but the constant oggling coming from Brian just came off as incredibly odd for someone so deep undercover.
We’re also two films in now and the wild contraptions and action sequences have already taken a turn for the hilarious; I can’t wait to see how Tokyo Drift one-ups Brian’s flying boat takedown.
The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006)
2.5/5
Tokyo Drift is a really interesting addition to the series. At first, it appears to be entirely detached from the rest of the films and it pretty much is save for one character’s repeated returns later on. (Editor’s note: by the time you reach Fate of the Furious, this is pretty wrong.)
Diesel, not liking the script and having other things he wanted to pursue, declined to return once again for this third instalment and it was the same situation for much the rest of the cast. So, this film was actually meant to be a reboot, an attempt to get a new narrative off the ground in order to avoid having to rely on Diesel and the others.
Whereas the prior two films take place on the two opposite coasts of the US, Tokyo Drift - though starting out in America - takes things international for the first time ever and honestly it’s pretty exciting. There’s something engaging about an individual going through the typical fish-out-of-water plotline but finally connecting with his new environment through a shared love of a niche subculture - namely street racing.
I think the lack of an undercover Paul Walker rehash really helped the thing feel a bit fresher too. The fact that these kids are just kids does bring some odd-feeling associations with it, particularly the fact areas it mingles with the heavier organised criminal elements of Tokyo, but it also gives the film a little less of that self-seriousness that brings some of the other films down (the next film in the franchise in particular).
It’s also Lin’s most exciting direction in the franchise, it’s odd that he seems to have cut loose on his first film and spent the rest of his efforts in the series reeling things in more and more. Han (played by Sung Kang) is intensely watchable here, taking on the role of mentor and older brother really effectively, I remember being incredibly grateful to see his return in the other films.
The mystification of drifting is hilarious, though, it’s just the cherry on top of these things. Like the idea that it’s purely an export from Japan for some reason, the fact that you just need to feel it, that you need to believe. Perfection.
Fast & Furious (2009)
2/5
At this point in the series, the thing was rebooted again. Fast & Furious is still a sequel to what’s come before, and the series can still be watched from start to finish but, behind the scenes, it was always intended to give the franchise a new direction.
This is where Universal got a taste for the numbers they could pull transforming the Fast Saga into what it is today, transforming it in the wild spy caper it has become known as.
There’s a discernable discipline to the direction from Lin this time around. Clearly he’s either been given instructions to do so, or the subject matter has called for different handling, the more somber thriller angle - once more returning to Walker’s Brian O’Conner going undercover as a police officer - demanding less of that early-noughties, car enthusiast chaos.
I think my biggest issue here is that, quite honestly, the film is just boring. It lies in this weird purgatorial territory of lacking the character (and, crucially, the characters) of the later films and the fun energy of the first few films. It’s this weird intersection between the meatheaded plotting the series is known for and the corporatised, franchise filmmaking that has infected the entire thing.
Walker has become a far more competent actor at this point, so there’s less to grasp onto with his blank slate of a character in that kind of so bad it’s good way. His sort of himbo appeal has just disappeared and now he’s just this void of a character - you could easily see him being replaced by someone like Channing Tatum, Scott Eastwood (who effectively does replace him in the eighth film), maybe a Sam Worthington for that noughties action appeal.
To add to this, the character Brian’s embrace of the seriousness of his role as an agent also draws us away from this amusing clash between the entirely sober, elite spy agency sensibilities and the macho racer-type. Instead of the cop pretending to be a racer, now he’s racer pretending to be a cop and he’s doing a good job clearly because he’s just dull to watch, unfortunately.
The same is the case for Diesel. Without the rest of his team, he’s just not interesting to watch. The man has like three expressions: smoldering, amused happiness, and true neutral. Killing off Letty was just a horrible mistake that they did realise rather quickly, but just never made sense. I suppose it’s an extension of the kind of attitudes these films seem to have towards their female characters - being just objects of desire - but it’s no less jarring.
That initial sequence is just so exciting, but when it’s compared to the rest of the film, you’re just left thinking about why the decided to focus so hard on Toretto himself. It’s like they forgot that he was just a supporting character in the first film and doesn’t have the charisma Gibson does in 2 Fast to hold a film up alongside Walker.
Fast Five (2011)
3/5
Fast Five is definitely a high point in the franchise. The moment after the slump that is the reboot; where the stakes haven’t yet become numbingly high but we’ve got enough interesting stuff going on that you’re not being bored to tears. During this one, we start forming the team that we all know and love.
Sung Kang’s Han returns fully and not just in a cameo role, as do Tyrese Gibson’s Roman, Ludcris’ Tej, Gal Gadot’s Gisele and Matt Schulze’s Vince and things become a lot lighter and more engaging.
Also entering the franchise here is Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as Diplomatic Security Service agent Luke Hobbs, a dedicated super-soldier hellbent on tracking Dom and Brian down. He’s a character I knew would return, and I knew probably wouldn’t remain an antagonistic force to the crew, but his whiplash in this film is just immense.
When he appears, he’s a jingoistic patriot, following orders to the letter and enjoying it - Tennyson’s phrase in the Light Brigade on reasoning “why” comes to mind - and at the point the film needs him to change, to come on side, though there’s some effort made to provide reasoning, it just rings hollow, his flip is just a completely bizarre U-turn. One minute he’s a completely pure lawman, the other he’s complicit in a massively destructive heist. I suppose it doesn’t really matter in a series like this, it was just wild to me.
Generally, I do think this is a fun film, though, you’re not really tired of any of the characters by this point and, though it’s the first instance of the film’s catastrophically upping their runtimes by North of twenty minutes, this is probably the only one that doesn’t exactly feel like it drags.
My last point on this film would be that I don’t think the fight these films pick with physics are necessarily the most important things to fixate on. Realism in physics isn’t an inherently virtuous thing. But this being said, when you’ve got a ten-minute sequence involving two cars heaving a bank vault down a road, it’s tricky not to start getting a little distracted.
Fast & Furious 6 (2013)
2.5/5
After the fun that was Fast Five, this was kind of dull and actually just relatively difficult to follow. It's so incredibly bloated and full of plot I just switched off. This is the mark of a downwards trend for the kind of plotting recurring director Justin Lin and screenwriter Chris Morgan have decided to go for. I think the worst films in the series - or at least those beyond Tokyo Drift - are easily described as fetch-quests where other events are just thrown in in an attempt to keep things from getting too stale.
I mean, of course it would go this way, the films are mainly concerned with heists after all, but then why do other films that fall into the same genre seem able to make something more of themselves with so much less? I think fundamentally, the issue here is that too much emphasis is put upon the thing being stolen. The reason why this emphasis is being placed is that the filmmakers need something that will give the film stakes (the reason they don’t think the human dynamics present are enough to do this is unknown to me but it seems somewhat telling.)
What it means, though, is that we get this ever-present sliding scale of world-ending MacGuffins, from God’s Eye to Snowflake to whatever it is that’s sure to be an object of desire for both Diesel and new arrival, John Cena, in F9, accompanied by a set of evermore dangerous villains and exponentially more expensive set pieces.
This isn’t inherently a bad thing (much as some critics or commentators - the bad ones I should add - seem to label some tropes as being) but what it does mean is that literally everything seems to be predicated upon your investment in these production feats that are literally only possible because of the huge budgets these films warrant.
What I mean to say is that, because of this heavy emphasis, every other aspect of these films suffers.
Hobbs is now just pinballing back and forth between motivations and the sort of moral underpinnings of the crew are more inconsistent than they’ve ever been before, wanting to save the world and yet never reconsidering the catastrophic collateral damage they incur in their recklessness.
I think this is probably one of the first films that has purported to have an explicit dialogue about family and codes of honour but because of literally everything else on display in the film, it just rings so incredibly hollow to me. There’s kind of a dark twistedness to Dom’s musings on family when no one else’s seems to matter to the crew.
That was a bit of a slog, I realise, but it felt like it needed to be addressed at some point here.
Luke Evans’ Owen Shaw is a relatively interesting foil to Dom’s family-man but a well-rounded character he obviously is not. It’s a really shame, honestly. Lin and Morgan really fumble what could have been a pretty interesting discussion about the differing criminal racing crew’s ethics and why that difference matters at all. Considering they're now working with the law, Dom’s crew seeing a reflection of themselves in the crew they're hunting would have been really compelling. Especially considering Letty’s role in both groups.
And yeah, Letty’s amnesia and re-emergence are just eye-rolling. She should really never have been killed off in the first place. There’s nothing compelling about her return to the fold and seeing Vin Diesel trying to charm her all over again is something nobody should have to watch.
Yeah, this film really didn’t stick in my mind at all. It’s one of the worst in the franchise.
Furious 7 (2015)
2/5
But things only slip further downhill in this next film and depressing send-off for the late Paul Walker, whose progression as an actor has been one of the more compelling things to see with each new film.
In yet another example of the team going after a device in an attempt to stop another from getting their hands on it, this time the crew are trying to get their hands on a superweapon for some kind of private military contractor named Mister Nobody - who just so happens to be played by Kurt Russell. It’s a really odd role that appears to be reprised in later films, and one that just sticks out like a sore thumb.
Nobody’s the exact character you’d imagine might turn out to be a bit of a baddy in the latter acts of a film, being the head of a shadowy organisation that just seems a little too eager to help the good guys out at first glance. The fact that he’s played by Russell just adds to this feeling that this really should be a more significant role and it just isn’t.
You might think this is a brilliant little piece of subversion but that just doesn’t sit right with me honestly. There’s something just so nefarious about taking this panopticon-establishing device from one warlord and giving it to another because he likes beer and is a little friendly.
And this is kind of my gripe with the fact that the film just kind of drops this superweapon in and never really justifies it. It’s such a specific device to have as your MacGuffin only to not discuss it in any way. As I say, it’s there for stakes and nothing more.
Alongside Russell’s entry into the franchise is Ramsey who is played by British actress Nathalie Emmanuel, who also kind of doesn’t really justify her existence beyond helping the plot progress. Right out the gate, she’s being ogled by Tej and Roman just like any other woman in the franchise and soon she becomes nothing more than a sort of partner-in-crime to Tej, whose hacking skills have been significantly inflated since last we saw them on display - probably to prevent his redundancy next to this new hacktivist character.
The scene in Abu Dhabi is interesting for a variety of reasons. The first of these is that yet again it’s a display of someone hiding their top-secret computer chip in their prized car. This has happened so many times in these films I’m really starting to wonder how many people actually do this. I feel like I’d be surprised.
In addition to this, we have a weird cameo from Rhonda Rousey that sort of mirrors the Ed Sheeran Game of Thrones debacle in how far it takes you out of the action, and then everything to do with Dom, Brian and that car. Firstly, Dom lifting the car up is so out of the blue and sudden I just had to see if this is actually a really light car. But no, it isn’t, they just need Dom to lift it up for some reason.
This being said, maybe in Abu Dhabi the gravity is just a little weaker, since we also have a certain triple car jump that is just bizarre, but actually pretty thrilling to my mind. I didn’t actually hate this bit even if it’s absurd.
Finally, I should probably touch on the older Shaw brother, played here by Jason Statham. Statham is a boon to the franchise to be sure, but here he doesn’t really get to hit his stride as a foil to Hobbs. His being placed opposite Vin Diesel just kind of shows how bland Dom and how far he hamstrings the villains of the franchise by their needing to be a reflection of his one way or another. This is to say that Statham’s hard-man persona left to its own device is really dry viewing.
Thought it was also just pretty funny how much of a family man Deckard is compared to Owen. Not sure we’ll ever get any explanation about that but it’s odd that they had the younger brother be the antithesis to Dom’s familial thesis when the rest of his family seem to be pretty intent on family honour.
The Fate of the Furious (2017)
3.5/5
Right out of the gate, F8 is one of if not the best Fast & Furious film out right now. Compared to the others, it’s probably the most character-driven narrative to inhabit the franchise and it really thrives because of it. Add to this the mind-boggling cameos (how on Earth did they get Dame Helen Miren; wait, wait, don’t tell me) and the fairly on-point comedy from some of its most surprising corners, and it soon becomes a film I’d actually go to bat for.
Opening on the Rock performing the (what I think is) the Siva Tau with his daughter’s football team must be the zenith of Hobbs’ character arc. It’s hilarious to think that he started out as a no-nonsense operator operating pretty illegally on foreign soil and has become pretty much just the Rock. This showing actually makes me fairly excited for Hobbs and Shaw, I don’t know if the Rock and Statham can necessarily hold a film like this up by themselves, but I can’t deny that they’re some of the best parts of this film.
By the franchise’s standards, too - narratively at the very least - it’s probably one of the more considered films, happy to go in some new directions in just how it tells its story. I was really pleasantly surprised to see the film’s restraint early on when we’re only treated to the aftermath of the crew’s latest heist, rather than indulging in more action.
But this isn’t to say it’s absolutely wild and as bombastic as the others.
One of my favourite moments in the film also occurs early on. Fleeing the black-SUV driving baddies who’ve started tailing the crew after that off-screen heist, eyes fall onto Tej for a getaway plan. Of course, Tej has one and hit a button, dropping a wrecking ball and allowing it to swing through the pack of pursuers. But the desired effect isn’t entirely achieved. Havoc is absolutely wrought, but a few are left standing.
Roman yells to Tej, asks him what else he’s got up his sleeve and Tej reassures him, tells him to watch what’s next.
But he doesn’t hit another button, he doesn’t have another trick, the wrecking ball just swings back, like it normally would anyway.
Everyone is shocked, it worked! And it’s just hilarious to me that the trick Tej had up his sleeve was gravity doing its job. Just seems quite telling what level we’re operating at when a twist, a small one but a twist nonetheless, centres around a basic law of physics being adhered to.
Moving on though, Dom’s being blackmailed is a little farfetched but I feel like it’s an easy hurdle to jump to stay engaged in the story. It appears to be the kind of reverse of what we saw in number 6, but it’s far more effective because quite simply the filmmakers care more about Dom than they seem to do Letty. It’s still not a mind-blowing twist or anything, but there’s actual tension at times, especially that regarding Dom’s child.
Speaking of Dom’s child, that scene with Statham in the plane is genuinely laugh-out-loud funny to me and I was so glad they indulged a little in beyond the first moments we see it. It’s charming, well-choreographed and a moment that didn’t need to happen that I’m glad did.