K-SCORE: 25
Directors: Rob Cohen, John Singleton, Justin Lin, James Wan
Writers: I don’t know, a few hundred?
Starring: Paul Walker, Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez, Dwayne Johnson, Jordana Brewster, Tyrese Gibson, Chris ‘Ludacris’ Bridges, Sung Kang, Lucas Black, Jason Statham
Spoiler Level: Moderate
“I hope the gold bikini dancers return in Eight Furious Fast Men, F9, Ten times Faster, Ocean’s Fast 11, Furious Twelve: Fasten Your Seatbelts, Furious and Fast, Fast 14: Shanghai Furious, and Fast and Furious 15: Cruise Control.”
If I were to make a list of the most confusing things about the society I live in, the success of The Fast and the Furious franchise would make the top five, some place either just above or just below the prevalence of hashtags. I have friends and brothers that have seen all of these films and watched them way before I did and talked about them like they had any content worthy of acknowledgement and it got to the point where I felt I had to sit down, absorb them all, and see what’s up, so to speak. Firstly, it took me years to actually accomplish this feat. There is fourteen goddamn hours of this crap. Somewhere about forty-five minutes into the first one I just lost all enthusiasm for whatever it was these movies were dishing out. Secondly, nothing is up. They’re terrible! And they’re all the same movie. Over and over and over and over again. There are shiny cars, PG-13 violence, stunts that go from implausible to cannot be rationally reconciled in a universe with any kind of consistent physics, convoluted crime schemes, scantily clad women dancing outside, and Vin Diesel confusing his friends for his family (except for Jordana Brewster, who actually plays his sister). That’s it.
Where is the market? People, I don’t understand what you’re getting out of this relationship. You’ve given the creators of The Fast and the Furious literally billions of dollars of your money and for what?
“The only way for a good guy to die in this series is a contract dispute.”
Do you like cars? Okay, but it’s not like the film is a love letter to car design or engineering. The characters talk about cars as if they have reverence for them and then treat them like micro machines in the hands of a sadistic five-year-old. In Furious Seven, Paul Walker (may he rest in peace) mentions that a car is one of seven in the world and it’s worth something like three and a half million dollars, and immediately he and Vin Diesel drive it out of the weird vault where it’s stored and off two skyscrapers to its doom.
Do you like stories of undercover cops and criminals? Six of the seven stories are functionally identical and don’t make one bit of sense. Some master villain has almost no plan to do anything other than piss off Vin Diesel and then get killed as he out machismos everyone else. Ludacris fills in a pathetic few of the cratered field of plot holes with expositional lines about hacking. Paul Walker, codename: Brian, is around to smile stupidly at the camera and drive alongside everyone else.
Do you like the violence and the bitches? (I know, bitches are great! Turn up the music - they just dance more - and they spend all day washing windshields with their tits.) Why would you turn to a PG-13-numbed franchise to satisfy your baser urges. Characters don’t bleed in the impossible worlds of The Fast and the Furious. Machine guns never hit their targets. Characters don’t get hurt when they get into terrifying car crashes. There are no stakes whatsoever because Dominic Toretto and his crew are indestructible. It’s at Friday the 13th Jason Vorhees level now. If a nuke were to blow up with Vin Diesel, The Rock, or even Tyrese hugging it, I wouldn’t be convinced that they actually killed off the character. A psychopath could spend ten minutes cutting into Michelle Rodriguez’s head with a rotary saw, and all I’d think was that she either is going to have amnesia or that her previous amnesia will now be cured. The only way for a good guy to die in this series is a contract dispute.
The characters are awful. Dom is just a top heavy beefcake who is way too soft-hearted to be a badass, mostly caring about his sister and barbecues with an unwillingness to do anything other than punch evil people in the gut. Brian has no abilities, which includes communicating with fellow humans. Roman is the comic relief and at no point is he funny. Tej, (I had to look Ludacris’s character name up and I still can’t believe that’s right) is the brains behind the operation and yet never does anything clever, instead opting to operate a laptop from the passenger seat of a car to exacerbate a conflict destined to end in a fiery explosion regardless of his actions. Letty only ever causes conflict. Hobbs, played by The Rock who acts circles around the rest of the bunch, really is a redundant character since he’s just going to have fist fights with villains in exactly the same style that Vin Diesel does. The villains are easily thwarted because they don’t even have a master plan to begin with, just a target on their head saying evil. And all the other characters are there to highlight some Asian shit the various directors are infatuated with.
The most remarkable thing about these films is how terribly they are named. To call the naming sequence inconsistent is like calling the stunt with the safe in Fast 5 unrealistic. It just doesn’t quite capture the essence of the issue. The Fast and the Furious, 2 Fast 2 Furious, where they really went awry by getting creative (not that creative though, it’s a pun on the words two and too), The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, which goes nicely with the franchise much like ketchup goes nicely with a stack of pancakes, Fast and Furious, my vote for somehow the dumbest name, Fast 5, Fast and Furious 6, and then Furious Seven. If you had the creators name the first seven letters of the alphabet, they’d say, “Alpha, b,b,bees, C is for cat, A4, E, Eff, letter six, and Furious Seven.”
These are bad cops and robbers plots, inauthentic characters brought to life by bad actors, no stakes, no humor, stunts that I don’t find that cool because they are so beyond the realm of impossible it’s like trying to be impressed with beautiful photography that was just photoshopped, all repeated a truly insane number of times. Yet, in all those hours, there are a few wonderful moments that I have found. They may or may not be what you expect.
Moment One: Brian in the first film walks into a shop where he works as an underling, also secretly an undercover cop, and asks for NOS, to win a street race, which has no bearing on the plot, and his boss, reluctantly acquiesces to that request. They kick it all off with total confusion, which is good, because it’s letting you know what you’re in for.
Moment Two: There’s a sequence of drifting in Tokyo Drift that lasts so long that I fell asleep and woke up later and they were still drifting and it felt like I’d been hypnotized by the film. No one explains the advantage gained from drifting, which makes me think drifting is the series’s way of robbing you of your ability to analyze what’s going on screen and getting you to keep coming back for entry after entry regardless of what they put in there. This is the closest thing I have to an explanation for how this franchise is so successful.
Moment Three: Campos is Braga - In the fourth entry the writers introduce a villain named Braga who is supposedly an overlord for a number of subsidiary villains that are being led by a guy named Campos. Then they tell you, as if it’s a twist, that Campos is the highest up on the criminal hierarchy. It’s not like Campos was ever masquerading as a good guy. It’s not like either the name Campos or the name Braga carried any weight or special significance. The idea that we, the viewers, were going to be somehow impressed or intrigued that the bad guy that was only ever alluded to and never depicted doesn’t exist and that the one we already were familiar with is still bad is so preposterously stupid it’s actually genuinely entertaining. Well done.
Moment Four: At the beginning of Fast Five, Brian and Dom fall from a moving car that they drove off a train off of a cliff, plummet about four hundred feet, and land in a lake. So they’re dead. The film doesn’t even pretend like they have minor injuries after falling from a height that would shatter your bones. Never underestimate the infinite impulse of water and car roofs. But this particular scene lends credence to my theory that everything that takes place after this point is a dream sequence, some kind of death’s door mirage, or fugue vision of a comatose patient.
Moment Five: There are gold-painted dancers in gold bikinis surrounding a gold fountain in a tower in Abu Dhabi that really tickled my imagination. Who is paying them and for what purpose? Sadly they ran away when Jason Statham showed up and started firing a machine gun in the air because Jason Statham is the kind of man who has managed to make an entire highly lucrative career of angrily firing a machine gun into the air for no reason. I hope the gold bikini dancers return in Eight Furious Fast Men, F9, Ten times Faster, Ocean’s Fast 11, Furious Twelve: Fasten Your Seatbelts, Furious and Fast, Fast 14: Shanghai Furious, and Fast and Furious 15: Cruise Control.
Now, I know this franchise will die long after I do, but for entries in the future, I’d ask that people please refrain from one thing: telling me that the entries are significantly different. Paul Walker died in a car accident (an irony I can’t stop seeing) and I’m still not convinced I’ve seen the last of Brian O’Connor. (O’Connor? Really?)