the fast and the furious

The Fate of the Furious (2017)

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The premise of the eighth entry in the Fast & Furious franchise is that Vin Diesel’s long-time ringleader/paterfamilias Dominic Toretto (or, Daddy Dom, if you will) betrays his street racing brethren and turns his back on Family. Now, if you’ve been paying any attention to the first seven installments of the series, God help you, you already know that Family is all that matters to the speed demon lug. He won’t shut up about it. That’s why the betrayal is so cold and so out of character. Worse yet, in this most recent episode the franchise itself turns its back in its own long-time partners, ice cold bottles of Corona. The film betrays over fifteen years of brand loyalty by nonchalantly switching the Fast Family’s beer preference to Bud heavies as if we wouldn’t notice. It also brings back an old villain, played by Jason Statham, who is responsible for the deaths of past Family members as a Good Guy who’s just welcomed to the team with mostly open arms, few questions asked. The Fate of the Furious also breaks format by featuring a couple brutal, non-driving related deaths (including a propeller-aided one that even involves a touch of blood splatter) and by shifting focus from Familial drama to bombastic comedy, where jokes are given far more breathing room than the overstuffed dramatic beats. It’s not just Dom that turns his back on long-established alliances and moral codes in The Fate of the Furious. F. Gary Gray’s contribution to the series also betrays everything that’s come before it in terms of narrative and tone. In a way, though, that kind of blasphemy is perfectly at home with the spirit of the series.

The Fast and the Furious is a universe without a center. It’s a series that continually retcons stories, characters, and even deaths to serve the plot du jour. The first four films in the franchise in particular are a total mess, continuity-wise. It wasn’t until Fast Five that it even found its voice: Vin Diesel endlessly mumbling about Family. The series may be Fast and Amnesious with its various narrative threads on the whole, but Dominic Toretto had always been there to keep the Family together, even in the franchise’s furthest outlier, the under-appreciated Tokyo Drift. That’s why it’s a brilliant move to shake up the sense of normalcy that’s been in-groove since the fifth installment by giving Daddy Dom a reason to walk away from his Family, whom he loves so dearly. At the starting line of The Fate of the Furious, Dominic Toretto is a Christ-like figure, a Man of the People, a Hero to Children Everywhere. He takes a quick break from his honeymoon in Havana with series regular Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) to shame a predatory loan shark in front of the very people he bullies by beating him in an old-fashioned street race while driving backwards & on fire. Every last person in Cuba cheers and we’re all quickly reminded exactly why Daddy Dom is the Greatest Man Alive. This street racing reverie is disrupted by a late 90s holdover Super Hacker played by Charlize Theron. Theron’s newbie baddy preys on Dom’s infamous devotion to Family and mysteriously blackmails him into “going rogue,” stealing EMP devices & “nuclear footballs” to support her Evil Hacker cause. This betrayal of what is Right and Just leads to a global car chase where Dom’s long list of Family members (Rodriguez, The Rock, Ludacris, apparently Statham, etc.) try to steal him away from Theron, who pushes Dom to “abandon his code” and “shatter his Family.” It’s all very silly, but it’s also a welcome departure from the typical Fast & Furious dynamic.

Of course, The Fate of the Furious was never going to survive on its tonal consistency or the strength of its plot. What really matters here is the action movie spectacle. F. Gary Gray brings the same sense of monstrously explosive fun to this franchise entry as he did to the exceptional N.W.A. biopic Straight Outta Compton. The Rock is a real life superhero, particularly shining in a music video-esque prison riot sequence where he manually destroys an entire building full of lowlifes (including local pro wrestler Luke Hawx, who also briefly appeared in Logan earlier this year). At one point, Charlize Theron’s Ultimate Hacker gives the ridiculous command “Hack ’em all,” and remotely takes control of virtually every vehicle in NYC, giving rise to literal floods & waterfalls made of cars. Vin Diesel rocks a heavy metal welding mask & oversized chainsaw combo that makes him look like the villain from a dystopian slasher. Even more ridiculously, the Fast Family is asked to race and battle a nuclear-armed submarine that attacks them from under the Russian ice they drive flimsy sports cars across. And (mild spoilers, I guess) they win! As far as The Fate of the Furious might stray from past tonal choices and character traits, it ultimately sticks to he core of the only thing that has remained consistent in the series (now that Dom’s had his opportunity to Go Rogue): there’s no problem in the world that can’t be solved by a deadly, explosion-heavy street race and even the most horrific of Familial tragedies can be undone by a backyard barbeque, where grace is said before every meal and Coronas, um, I mean Budweisers are proudly lifted into the air for a communal toast. There’s something beautiful about that (and also something sublimely silly).

Besides the narrative ways in which The Fate of the Furious breaks format, the film also marks a shift where the franchise functions as an outright, intentional comedy. F. Gary Gray openly shows his roots in the Friday series with the way humor overtakes Family drama in this entry. Vin Diesel starts off the film with the same “Ain’t I a stinker?” mugging he used to anchor xXx: Return of Xander Cage earlier this year. Ludacris’s nerd archetype is in constant verbal sparring with Tyrese Gibson’s womanizing ham. Dick jokes, Taylor Swift references, and meta humor about The Rock’s past life as Hercules all seem to be afforded more heft than the mood-killing dramatic beats, which breeze by no matter how shocking or tragic. The series also seems to have moved on from stunt casting rappers to enlisting well-respected actors for over-the-top cameos, this time none other than Helen Mirren. Despite rumors about an on-set rivalry between Vin Diesel & The Rock and a few drastic shakeups to the franchise’s central Family dynamic, F. Gary Gray manages to keep the mood in The Fate of the Furious just about as light as its explosions are frequent & loud.

If I have any complaints about this most recent entry to the series, it’s that it wasn’t quite blasphemous enough. The Fast & Furious franchise is overdue for another Tokyo Drift-style shakeup that completely disrupts the rules of its universe. Why not take this carnival to space? Why not have the Family get caught up in A Race Through Time? Why not have them travel to Hell and win back the life of a fallen member by beating The Devil Himself in a street race? If the series continues down its current path, I have no doubt it’ll remain a fun, absurd source of racing-themed entertainment. There’s just so much potential for it to jump a new shark in every franchise entry, though, (including literally jumping sharks!) and I think it’s more than ready to both make the leap and stick the landing.

-Brandon Ledet

Superfast! (2015)

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If you only paid attention to the examples of ZAZ-style spoof media inflicted upon the world by Jason Friedberg & Aaron Seltzer, it’d be understandable if you thought the format dead & worthless. For every brilliant spoof movie like Spy & Walk Hard, Friedberg & Seltzer have released a slew of awful garbage fires like Meet the Spartans, Disaster Movie, and Vampires Suck. The duo have an incredible talent for sucking the humor out of even the silliest of genre films under the guise of “making fun”. Their films suffer from something I used to call Mad TV Syndrome (back when that was a relevant reference): the subject they’re parodying is always more amusing in reality than it is in the spoof.

Even though I knew that I had very little patience for Friedberg & Seltzer’s brand of subpar spoof comedy, I was still morbidly curious about their Fast & Furious parody Superfast!. What was most interesting to me about the film was the timing. First of all, it seems strange that they waited until seven films into the franchise to spoof it, but even stranger still is their decision to make fun of Paul Walker so soon after his tragic death. Superfast! is not funny. It’s not clever. It boasts no commendable performances or standout gags. It’s not even particularly knowledgeable about the target of its “comedy”. It is, however, a fascinating exercise in bad taste. Reducing a beloved & much missed action movie star to a punchline in a movie meant to wean scrap change off the release of his final film was ill-advised at best & repugnantly cruel at worst.

Within the film, Walker’s surrogate, Lucas, is dumb & Californian. That’s essentially the extent of the film’s humorous insight into his seven-film stretch as an undercover cop turned international criminal with a heart of gold. Lucas isn’t bright & he sounds like a surfer. Boy, did they get him good. They really showed his recently-deceased ass who’s boss. To be fair, Superfast! also makes time to poke fun at the supposed low intelligence of Vin Diesel & The Rock (who are, by all accounts, intelligent & kind human beings in real life) and at the very least they didn’t name the character “Paul” (despite other characters being named Vin, Michelle, and Jordana after the real-life actors who play their counterparts), so it easily could’ve been worse. That still isn’t much a consolation, though, considering the nature of Walker’s death & the timing of the film’s release.

The film isn’t completely devoid of insightful jabs at the Fast & Furious franchise. It picks up on a lot of the same rapper cameos, car parts gibberish, and Corona ad-placement elements that I poked a little fun at in my own tour through the series. It just feels like it’s at least four or five films into the franchise too late, considering the kind of jokes it’s making at the film’s expense. Despite the inclusion of a The Rock stand-in, almost all of the film’s humor is based on the first three Fast & Furious movies, a major mistake considering that the franchise didn’t culminate until its own unique property until almost five films into its run. There wasn’t even a single reference to Vin Diesel’s longwinded rants about “family”, which have essentially become the heart of the franchise. At this point, it’s been so long since the series’ trashy lowpoint beginnings that titles like Tokyo Drift play much more humorously than any jokes about the movie ever could. Combine Superfast!‘s too-late 12 year old boy humor with the porn-quality production, an extended reference to Minions (a vile offense, that), the misguided belief that it’s just hilarious to suggest that Michelle Rodriguez is homosexual (she’s bi), and the cringe-inducing mistake of poking fun at a recently-deceased actor and you have one terrible film that I’m already actively trying to forget.

-Brandon Ledet

A Newcomer’s Guide to the Fast & Furious Franchise

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As I have previously explained, I am a recent convert to the Fast & Furious universe. Despite the 15 year run of the franchise’s cultural ubiquity, I’ve somehow managed to avoid ever seeing a Fast & Furious movie in full until a few weeks ago. Sure, I’ve seen them playing as background noise in various bars & living rooms over the years, but I’ve never bothered to watch a single picture from front to end. When the series first got started I was a gloomy teenage snob who wouldn’t be caught dead watching such mindless machismo, but something happened in the years since: I grew a sense of humor. And while I was working on that, something else happened: the series seemingly got exponentially ridiculous with each sequel. It’s rare these days for any genre film outside of slasher flicks to earn six sequels, but here we are in 2015 with a car racing movie reaching its seventh installment this month: Furious 7. The ads for that seventh installment finally brought me to my tipping point. Furious 7 promised to be so deliciously over the top that when I first saw the ad in the theater I finally felt compelled to catch up with the entire series, an urge I followed voraciously in the past few weeks.

It turns out that the story of the Fast & Furious franchise is the story of an ever-ballooning budget. The 2001 debut installment cost $38 million to make, while in 2015 a Fast & Furious movie costs $250 million. The first three or so Fast & Furious movies serve mostly as cheap cultural relics, time capsules of bad taste in the early 00s. As the budget continued to expand (along with Vin Diesel’s delightfully long winded musings on the nature of “family”) so did the scope of the action sequences and the feeling that the franchise had actually started to pull its own weight as a unique intellectual property. During this transition the focus of the films also deviated from its street racing roots and instead pursued what it self-describes in the latest film as “vehicular warfare”. The street racing of the early films are mostly gone, but far from forgotten as the series has become completely wrapped up in its own mythology, pretending that the past was more significant than it was and pushing what it can do in the present to any & all ridiculous heights allowed by the strengths of an ever-sprawling cast & budget.

Listed below, in chronological order, are all seven feature films in the Fast & Furious franchise as seen through my fresh, previously uninitiated eyes. Each entry is accompanied by brief re-caps of its faults & charms, but also has its own individual full-length review, which you can find by clicking on the links in the titles themselves. If you are also looking to get initiated into the Fast & Furious world yourself, but wanted to skip the franchise’s humbly trashy beginnings, I highly recommend watching the fifth, sixth, third, and seventh installments (curiously enough, in that specific sequence).

The Fast and the Furious (2001)EPSON MFP imagethree star

The very first installment of the Fast & Furious is mostly effective as a baseline measurement for the series. It was exactly what I had expected from the franchise as a whole: rap-rock era machismo way more concerned with cartoonishly fast cars, gigantic guns, and impressively elaborate action sequences than its superfluous plot about an undercover cop. It features such macho trademarks as rap metal, backyard grilling, lipstick lesbianism and, of course, extensive street racing. In this earliest installment the cars move so fast that light warps around them like spaceships in old-line sci-fi, their roaring engines overpowering the sound design & the inner workings of their nitrous oxide systems becoming a fetishistic focus for the CGI. The Fast and the Furious is entertaining enough as a mindless action flick & a trashy cultural relic, but it doesn’t even approach the peak ridiculousness achieved in later installments. It does have its campy moments, though, even if they never reach a fever pitch.

MVP of the cast: The stunt-casting of Ja Rule, who’s neither fast nor furious enough to earn a threesome in a street race.
Most curious detail: The fact that somehow no one on the California street racing scene seems to think it’s fucked up that their drag race competition is called “Race Wars.”

2 Fast 2 Furious (2003) EPSON MFP imagethree star

2 Fast 2 Furious isn’t necessarily much better or worse than its predecessor, but functions more like an echo. It hits the same plot points as the original (undercover policing, sports cars reaching warp speed, Paul Walker’s half-assed modes of seduction, etc.) with just a few basic casting substitutions distinguishing the two films. The strange thing about it is that the repetition doesn’t feel like much of a problem. It’s okay that both The Fast and the Furious and 2 Fast 2 Furious share so much in plot & sentiment because plot & sentiment are inessential to the films’ central draws: absurdly intricate action set pieces, a fetishistic love of sports cars, and charmingly dated ideas of cool. 2 Fast 2 Furious may be an exact structural photocopy of the first Fast & Furious installment, but it has such a deliriously lighthearted approach to the intense violence of its reality (a quality that made 80s action films the golden era of the genre) that it’s difficult to be too hard on it critically. Nearly all of the actors except Walker are substituted for new faces (an appropriately shirtless Tyrese Gibson & a Chicken-N-Beer era Ludacris make their welcomed debuts here, though their comic dynamic isn’t fully developed until later installments,) and there’s a complete absence of rap rock, lipstick lesbianism, and backyard grilling, but 2 Fast 2 Furious is still essentially a shameless retread of its precursor. However, it’s one that finds a way to make its more-of-the-same formula entertaining despite the familiarity.

MVP of the cast: The wise-cracking, often-shirtless sex god Tyrese Gibson.
Most curious detail: A not-so-sly reference to Ludacris’ hit song “Move Bitch” is made during a street race, but by a character who is not played by Ludacris.

The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006) EPSON MFP imagethreehalfstar

The third installment in the Fast & Furious franchise is not a particularly unique film when considered on its own merit, but it is very much an outlier in the series it’s a part of. The first two Fast & Furious films are undercover police thrillers about trust & family and the criminal world of California street racing. Tokyo Drift, on the other hand, is about a high school reprobate’s struggle to find The Drift within. The Drift, in case you somehow didn’t already know, is the ability to more or less drive sideways, something Japanese teens are apparently very good at. The Drift also serves as some kind of metaphor for growing up or taking responsibility or something along those lines (with a direct reference to The Karate Kid for full effect), but one thing’s for damn sure: it has nothing to do with the world of the Paul Walkers, Vin Diesels and Tyrese Gibsons of the first two films. There’s a hilarious last minute cameo that attempts to tie it into the rest of the series, but for the most part Tokyo Drift is a free-floating oddity, just sort of . . . drifting out on its own, disconnected. It was more than fair that die-hard fans furiously asked “Who are these people?!” upon its initial release, since the answer to that question doesn’t arrive until a post-credits stinger four films later. However, even though it was hated in its time, it’s a genuinely fun bit of trash cinema about the spiritual virtues of sideways driving, one with almost no regard for rest of the franchise at all.

MVP in the cast: The stunt casting of (Lil) Bow Wow, who plays a wisecracking sidekick that winks at the camera, delivers one-liners like “Japanese food is like the Army: don’t ask, don’t tell,” and refers to the Mona Lisa as that lady who’s smiling all the time.
Most Curious Detail: I’m pretty sure that during the opening race a smashed porta potty splashes digital feces on the camera lens.

Fast & Furious (2009) EPSON MFP imageonehalfstar

The fourth Fast & Furious film attempts to pull the series’ act together by working as retroactive franchise glue, bringing back characters that had been absent since the first film & connecting them to Sung Kang’s Han, a very important player from Tokyo Drift who (spoiler) is supposed to be very dead. The problem is that after these first ten minutes of retroactive narrative, Fast & Furious loses its sense of purpose. Setting the undercover police intrigue in the Dominican Republic, the film offers the franchise a new location, but not much else. For the most part, the action is standard stuff you’d expect in any action franchise: Vin Diesel hanging dudes out of windows by their ankles, Paul Walker chasing criminals down back alleys in his tailored federal agent suit, lots of tumbling cars, etc. The best moment, action wise, is when Diesel does a controlled slide (Tokyo style) under a tumbling 18 wheeler, but that takes place during that saving-grace opening set piece. The main thing it’s missing, however, is a sense of fun. Fast & Furious is just so unnecessarily dour, especially after the cartoonish excess of Tokyo Drift. After herding the narrative cats of the first three installments, the movie becomes exceedingly difficult to love. It does serve as a necessary bridge to better movies down the line, but when considered on its own, it’s not really worth its near two-hour runtime.

MVP of the cast: Han, resurrected through a receding timeline, not-so-seamlessly (but very much amusingly) sets up the franchise’s ever-shifting chronology in an exchange where he answers the line “Time for you to do your own thing,” with “I heard they’re doing some crazy shit in Tokyo . . .” They’re doing some crazy shit indeed, Han. First of all, they’re driving sideways.
Most curious detail: The film seems to have a strange fascination with GPS displays. The GPS imagery plays well into the series’ video game aesthetic, but really, it’s GPS; who cares?

Fast Five (2011) EPSON MFP imagethreehalfstar

There’s a lot of killer action movie surface pleasures scattered all over Fast Five (especially in its opening train heist set piece), but that’s not what makes it special. What distinguishes the film from its pedigree is Vin Diesel’s Dominic’s sudden conviction that his gang of ragtag criminals and former cops is a “family”. As far as the franchise goes, the “family” in the first four films act like distant cousins who might see each other once a decade. Suddenly, in Fast Five it’s genuinely moving when Dominic talks about how his father taught him about the importance of backyard grilling, how a family always sticks together, and so on. It’s not a perfect film; it could’ve allowed more screen time for newcomer The Rock & (I can’t believe I’m saying this) more street racing, not to mention that a ludicrous post-credits stinger has the gall to bring the dead back to life without explanation, but it was a huge step forward for the Fast & Furious series as a collective. Five films in, all the separate elements are finally clicking as a cohesive action movie unit. Where most extended franchises gradually unravel over the course of their sequels, this is one that took that time to find itself and cull its own “familial” mythology.

MVP of the Cast: Here we are introduced to Hobbs, played Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, who could only serve as a improvement to virtually any motion picture, because he is a perfect human being.
Most Curious Detail: An all-star crew of the gang/”family” members from the first four films are assembled here in the single best team-building montage outside of MacGruber. There’s some truly over the top, jaw-dropping spectacle in the opening train heist and a closing sequence involving a bank vault, but something about that montage feels like the first moments of the series coming into its own.

Fast & Furious 6 (2013) EPSON MFP imagefourstar

Fast & Furious 6 plays right into the franchise’s ever-increasing concern for tying the series together into a cohesive whole. The gang started properly functioning as a unit (or a “family,” if you will) in the fifth film, but this is where individual members of the Fast & Furious family become eccentric cartoon versions of themselves. They begin to get wrapped up in their own distinct mythologies the way the series as a whole got wrapped up in itself in the start-of-a-new-era Fast Five. Now that the “family” has come together as a tight unit, they’ve finally found a way to go truly over the top. The ridiculous caricatures and ever-expanding budget for the action sequences (which include a return to extensive street racing here, which had become surprisingly absent) are what make Fast & Furious 6 feel like a far cry from where the series began, but it’s not what makes the film important. As Vin Diesel’s Dominic would put it, it’s all about family. “Family” is what matters. If you’re on board with the series at this point it’s strangely satisfying to see the film’s major triumph be the gang coming together for a climactic backyard cookout, Coronas proudly lifted in the air. Fast & Furious 6 makes the audience feel like part of the “family”, like we’re all in for the silly ride together. Everyone involved has seemingly gotten comfortable with how ridiculous the series is and found their own ways to make it work as its own unique action franchise, with Vin Diesel standing tall as the most comfortable of them all. It’s adorable.

MVP of the cast: The heart really is in those “family”-obsessed Vin Diesel pep talks. Part of what makes it so convincing is that it feels like he truly believes it.
Most curious detail: The film’s central conflict is with a rival gang who, as Tyrese Gibson describes in an especially hilarious monologue, poses as the gang’s doppelgangers, because they do not believe in family and instead treat their criminal schemes like a business.

Furious 7 (2015)EPSON MFP imagefourstar

Furious 7’s charms depend greatly on the six films that precede it (this marks the first time that the Tokyo Drift storyline is firmly in the temporal rearview), but it uses that well-established history to its advantage as a launching pad for its larger-than-ever set pieces and relentless fan service. To a newcomer the barrage of seemingly insignificant callbacks could feel superfluous at best and grotesque at worst, but for a fan (even a recent convert such as myself), they’re pleasantly familiar. That’s not to say that a pair of fresh eyes would have nothing to enjoy here. At a remarkably brisk 137 minutes, Furious 7 is packed to the gills with action movie surface pleasures that reach new heights in its “vehicular warfare” that will dazzle even the uninitiated. However, anyone who has made it this far into the Fast & Furious ride (or at least tuned in after the not-so-great fourth one) is likely to feel an affinity for the series that not only excuses, but emphatically embraces its trashy, trashy charms as well. It’s sure to please the franchise’s established fans as well as gather some new ones along the way. There really is just so much movie here that anyone who enjoys loud, obnoxious action films in any capacity is likely find something to latch onto.

MVP of the Cast: Paul Walker’s transformation from a “sandwich crazy” undercover cop to an action movie legend was a gradual one that has now sadly come to a close. It’s always a bummer to watch a family member go, but Furious 7 does a great job of giving him a proper send-off.
Most Curious Detail: Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson puts his pro wrestling past to good use in a moment that includes him reviving his signature “Rock Bottom” move from the Attitude Era.

Lagniappe

The Fast and the Furious (1955) EPSON MFP imagetwohalfstar

A 1950’s car racing cheapie from Movie of the Month vet Roger Corman, The Fast and the Furious is far from the legendary director’s most interesting film, but it is only the second title (out of hundreds) that he produced and the first title ever produced by American International Pictures, the film company that helped make him a b-movie powerhouse. The film has very little connection to the much-more-infamous Paul Walker series outside of the purchase of its title rights, but that purchase was most certainly worth every penny. It’s a damn good title. Good thing they decided not stick with the much less compelling original name for the film, Crashout. Filmed in just ten days, The Fast and the Furious is one of many examples of Corman’s superhuman ability to make a surprisingly watchable picture on a tight budget, even if it isn’t a particularly memorable one. It does share some incidental similarities the Paul Walker franchise of the same name, like felons getting mixed up in car racing, racers inspecting/admiring each other’s gear, the featured inclusion of female racers, and (most incidentally of all) mentions of Coachella, California. Both Corman’s film and the 2000s franchise also have a tendency to mix corny comedy in with their criminal intrigue as well as an over-reliance on dated effects (whether they be CGI or driving scenes filmed in front of a projector). Corman’s The Fast and the Furious is by no means essential viewing, but it is an interesting footnote to the trashy cultural powerhouse that followed nearly 50 years later.

Better Luck Tomorrow (2002) EPSON MFP imagethree star

An MTV-produced slice of Asian-American ennui & teen criminality, Better Luck Tomorrow is the feature film debut of director Justin Lin, who made a cohesive whole out of the Fast & Furious franchise with his take on the third, fourth, fifth & sixth titles. The connection to the Fast & Furious universe is mostly tangential here, depending solely on the presence of a high school age Han, who first entered the picture in the oddball entry Tokyo Drift. Han is played by Sung Kang in both Better Luck Tomorrow as well as every Fast & Furious film directed by Lin. Although the connection is tenuous, it’s amusing to watch Lin’s debut and imagine the character’s origins here, not to mention that the film itself is an enjoyable indie crime drama with a killer soundtrack that features Le Tigre, Bonfire Madigan and Emily’s Sassy Lime. There are obviously no direct references to Fast & Furious to be found in the film, but there is the coincidental inclusion of this throwaway line: “We had the run of the place. Rumors about us came fast and furious.”

Turbo-Charged Prelude (2003) & Los Bandaleros (2009) EPSON MFP imageonestar

There have been two officially-released “short films” meant to serve as primers in-between the Fast & Furious features. The nearly dialogue-free short Turbo-Charged Prelude follows Paul Walker’s Brian through an evading-the-law montage that adds essentially nothing of value to the series, but instead plays like a music video for an overlong rap instrumental. I did like that it ended with the phrase “2 Be Continued . . .”, but that was its sole bright moment. The Vin Diesel-penned & directed short Los Bandaleros was a slightly more significant, portraying a Dominican getaway for Dominic & Letty in a sequence that doesn’t involve fast cars or explosions and even misses an opportunity to plug Coronas during its backyard cookout. There are some interesting musings on the prison system as the new slavery and yet another attempt to bridge Tokyo Drift to the rest of the series through Han, but the short is mostly a sweet, low-stakes tryst between Dominic & Letty that receives a vague callback in Furious 7, but really isn’t worth its 20min runtime for that connection.

-Brandon Ledet

Furious 7 (2015)

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The true story at this point of the Fast and Furious franchise is the story of an ever-ballooning budget. The 2001 debut installment cost $38 million to make, which it of course spent on fast cars & Ja Rule, depending on ultra-macho cheap thrills like rap rock & lipstick lesbianism to fill in the gaps. In 2015 a Fast and Furious movie costs $250 million to make, which gives it the freedom to tear down entire cities on the screen, no Ja Rule necessary. The first three or so Fast and Furious movies serve mostly as cultural relics, time capsules of bad taste in the early 00s. As the budget continued to expand (along with Vin Diesel’s delightfully long winded musings on the nature of “family”) so did the scope of the action sequences and the feeling that the franchise had actually started to pull its own weight as a unique intellectual property. The street racing & Ja Rules of the early films are mostly gone, but far from forgotten as the series has become completely wrapped up in its own mythology, pretending that the past was more significant than it was and pushing what they can do in the present to any & all ridiculous heights allowed by the strengths of an ever-sprawling cast & budget. Furious 7 may have taken my top spot in the franchise (although that may just be the post-theater buzz talking) simply because it’s so much movie.

Furious 7’s charms depend greatly on the six films that precede it (this marks the first time that the Tokyo Drift storyline is in the rearview), but it uses that well-established history to its advantage as a launching pad for its larger-than-ever set pieces and relentless fan service. It’s difficult to imagine just how much a newcomer would get out of early scenes where Vin Diesel’s Dominic struggles to keep his “family” together, including the significance of details like the house they worked so hard to hold onto, the struggle to keep Paul Walker’s Brian out of danger, and the faulty memory of Michelle Rodriguez’ Letty. There’s an excess of callbacks to seemingly insignificant details like a tuna sandwich from the first film, images & music lifted directly from Tokyo Drift (within which Lucas Black ages a decade in the blink of an eye), a return to the Race Wars (the ludicrous name of a street racing competition I still can’t believe no one in that world finds fucked up), outrageous stunt casting of flash-in-the-pan rappers (in this case the most-insignificant-yet, Iggy Azaelea), and increasingly obnoxious product placement for Corona. There was even a return to the excessive ogling of the early films, but with a modern update. If the gratuitous leering of the early 00s was Generation Lipstick Lesbian, Furious 7 poses the modern era as Generation Dat Ass, featuring a peculiarly intense focus on the female posterior. The only thing that was really missing was a backyard cookout. To a newcomer these callbacks could feel superfluous at best and grotesque at worst, but for a fan (even a recent convert such as myself), they’re pleasantly familiar.

That’s not to say that a pair of fresh eyes would have nothing to enjoy here. At a remarkably brisk 137 minutes, Furious 7 is packed to the gills with action movie surface pleasures: self-described “vehicular warfare”, flying cars, smashed buildings, absurdly intricate martial arts sequences, drones (or as Tyrese Gibson’s Roman calls them, “space ships”), hacker technobabble, rap music, and the aforementioned near-naked asses. On the gender-swapped side of that butt fetish is a gratuitous shot of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s mostly nude, entirely exceptional body lounging in a hospital bed that is sure to raise a couple heart rates. Although The Rock isn’t afforded much screen time, he makes the most of it. Besides appearing undressed, he also puts his pro-wrestling background to good use in some epic shit talking (“I’m gonna put a hurt on him so bad he’s gonna wish his mama had kept her legs closed”) and a fist fight in which he delivers his signiature “Rock Bottom” move to Jason Statham. However, even that fight pales in comparison to the stunts performed by legitimate hand-to-hand combat artists Ronda Rousey & Tony Jaa. The film could’ve used more of crowd favorite The Rock (and personal favorite Jordana Brewster), but the additions of newcomers like Rousey, Jaa, and total weirdo Kurt Russell more than filled the void.

There was also something missing in the absence of longtime Fast and Furious director Justin Lin, particularly in the scaled-back “family” talk that reached its fever pitch in Fast & Furious 6. Considering the real-life loss of Paul Walker, however, the “family” speeches that are included feel all the more significant. When Dominic says “I don’t have friends. I got family,” you could easily substitute the word “friends” for “fans”. Anyone who has made it this far into the Fast and Furious ride (or at least tuned in after the not-so-great fourth one) is likely to feel an affinity for the franchise that not only excuses, but emphatically embraces its trashy, trashy charms. Paul Walker’s transformation from a “sandwich crazy” undercover cop to an action movie legend was a gradual one that has now sadly come to a close. It’s always a bummer to watch a family member go and Furious 7 does a great job of giving him a proper send-off. The focus on fan-pleasing callbacks and the transition from the “family”-heavy Justin Lin run into a new era (in which Walker will not be joining us) distinguishes Furious 7 from the six previous installments, while still honors them with a lofty reverence. It’s sure to please the franchise’s established fans as well as gather some new ones along the way. There really is just so much movie here that anyone who enjoys loud, obnoxious action films in any capacity is likely find something to latch onto.

-Brandon Ledet

Fast & Furious 6 (2013)

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Surprisingly, it wasn’t until the fifth film in the Fast and Furious franchise when the series cracked the code and found its own distinct voice. That voice just happened to be Vin Diesel’s increasingly slow, gruff droning about the importance of family. Fast Five had an infectious way of making the central “family” bond feel truly important, despite the disconnected quality of the first three films that made the same characters feel entirely unrelated. Fast Five solidified that Dominic Torreto (Vin Diesel) and his ragtag gang can actually function as a cohesive unit. That gang’s-all-here vibe, paired with a ballooning budget, made the film one of the highlights of the franchise so far, right up there with the driving-sideways oddity Tokyo Drift.

Fast & Furious 6 plays right into this increasingly intense concern for tying the series together by kicking things off with a plot-summarizing montage (complete with a Wiz Khalifa rap) over its opening credits. If the gang started properly functioning as a unit in the last film, this is where they individually become eccentric cartoon versions of themselves. The Rock has essentially transformed into a flesh-tone version of The Hulk (putting that pro-wrestling background to good use early & often), Sung Kang’s Han is pretty much an anime character, Ludacris rigs an ATM to literally “make it rain”, etc. The series starts to get wrapped up in its own mythology the way the individual characters are wrapped up in theirs. Han’s threat that they might actually tie the storyline into Tokyo Drift continues for the third film running now with the exchange “We always talk about Tokyo.” “Tokyo it is.” (a promise they finally make good on in a ridiculous post-credits stinger). Paul Walker wistfully remarks upon how much the gang loves cookouts and Corona in the line “We got everything, down to the beer & the barbeque.” Most absurdly, the series continues its blend of policing & criminality by recruiting Vin Diesel as an honorary cop, which is a hilarious development at this point in the series. Now that the “family” has come together as a tight unit, they’ve finally found a way to go truly over the top.

The ridiculous caricatures and ever-expanding budget for the action sequences (which include crumbling buildings and a return to extensive street racing here) are what make Fast & Furious 6 feel like a far cry from where the series began, but it’s not what makes the film important. The heart really is in those “family”-obsessed Vin Diesel pep talks. If you’re on board with the series at this point it’s strangely satisfying to see the film’s major triumph be the gang coming together for a climactic backyard cookout, Coronas proudly lifted in the air. The film’s central conflict is with a rival gang who, as Tyrese Gibson describes in an especially hilarious monologue, poses as the gang’s doppelgangers, because they do not believe in family and treat their gang like a business. There are some returns to the hallmarks of the early films in the franchise: new toys that hack into power-steering systems to cause crashes, brutal fistfights (between women this time), new vehicles like a Batmobile knockoff and a goddamn tank, etc. The film also finds more room for street racing & driving-related set pieces, something that had faded to the background in the last couple pictures. What’s most impressive here, however, is that in addition to these trashy surface pleasures Fast & Furious 6 makes the audience feel like part of the “family”, like we’re all in for the silly ride together. Everyone involved has seemingly gotten comfortable with how ridiculous the series is and found their own ways to make it work as its own unique action franchise, with Vin Diesel standing tall as the most comfortable of them all. It’s adorable.

-Brandon Ledet

Fast Five (2011)

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In my review for the bottom-of-the-bucket sequel Fast & Furious (despite the misleading title, that’s the fourth film in the franchise), I called the film “unnecessarily dour”, which remains true, but that doesn’t mean it was entirely unnecessary. Fast & Furious worked as retroactive franchise glue, culling the scattered pieces of the first three films into a cohesive whole for the first time ever. While the first three installments seemed increasingly disinterested in constructing a consistent narrative as a set (with Tokyo Drift being the most hilariously detached of the bunch), the fourth was hell-bent on pretending that there was a grand purpose all along. It was not a pleasurable experience (there’s no reason it couldn’t have been fun while still being functional), but it did serve a purpose: setting the stage for Fast Five.

Fast Five picks up immediately where the fourth film left off, with newscasters (including Perd Hapley!) reporting on the disappearance of Vin Diesel & Paul Walker that concluded the last film, completing Walker’s transition from undercover cop to wanted man. Replacing Walker on the dangerous policing side of the occasion is a supercop played by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. This is essentially the perfect role for The Rock, as he is allowed both to show his chops as a legit actor (his natural charisma is undeniable) and also as an action-film-ready superhuman muscle god. More importantly, an all-star crew of the gang/”family” members from the first four films are assembled here in the single best team-building montage outside of MacGruber. Tyrese Gibson & Ludacris return as a genuinely hilarious comedy duo, playing off of each other’s personalities expertly. Jordana Brewster is finally allowed behind the wheel again (speaking of natural charisma, I can’t explain exactly why I like her so much). Han (Sung Kang) again teases just when Tokyo Drift will occur in the chronology, just like last time. When a character asks him about this directly, saying “I thought you wanted to get to Tokyo?” Han responds “We’ll get there. Eventually.” That’s just gold. Diesel & The Rock’s onscreen interactions are pure gold as well, especially in a especially brutal fistfight that almost results in a bare-fists murder. There’s an overriding vibe of “the gang’s all here” that makes the film a fun, over-the-top ride of campy action.

Giving the cast a narrative reason to coexist was a somewhat important development, but what’s really important is that they’re firing on all cylinders as a group here. This is apparent as early as the opening heist, which is easily the most absurd action set piece of the series so far. It’s a glorious spectacle of a high speed train robbery that includes flying cars, flying Paul Walker, and a grand entrance in which Vin Diesel rips the wall off the side of a train. There’s a second over-the-top action sequence at the end of the film featuring an oversized vault being dragged behind a car like a wrecking ball, but even that scene has a difficult time topping the jaw-dropping opening minutes. In between those two points of widespread, car-driven mayhem, there’s a return to the torture scenes of the first couple films, a callback to the on-the-lens fecal splash of Tokyo Drift, and the highest kill count by gunfire of any film in the series so far, just endless scores of dead Brazilian cops & criminals left by the wayside.

There’s a lot of killer action movie surface pleasures scattered all over Fast Five, but that’s not what makes it special. What distinguishes the film is Vin Diesel’s Dominic’s sudden conviction that his gang of ragtag criminals and former cops is a “family”. Why is it suddenly so stirring when Diesel talks about family in Fast Five, so much more so than it was in previous installments? It’s because it feels like he truly believes it. As far as the franchise goes, the “family” in the first four films act like distant cousins who might see each other once a decade. Suddenly, in Fast Five it’s genuinely moving when Dominic talks about how his father taught him about the importance of backyard grilling, how a family always sticks together, and so on. It’s not a perfect film; it could’ve allowed more screen time for The Rock & (I can’t believe I’m saying this) more street racing and a ludicrous post-credits stinger has the gall to bring the dead back to life without explanation, but it was a huge step forward for the Fast and Furious franchise. Five films in, all the separate elements are finally clicking as a cohesive action movie unit. Where most extended franchises gradually unravel over the course of their sequels, this is one that took that time to find itself and cull its own “familial” mythology.

-Brandon Ledet

Fast & Furious (2009)

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Over its first three installments, the Fast and Furious franchise had very little concern for establishing a consistent narrative. Watching the films for the first time, it’s been difficult to imagine just how & when it got to the grand, sprawling-cast action spectacle promised in the trailer for Furious 7, as there was very little connecting the films besides a sports car fetish and an affinity for Corona. 2 Fast 2 Furious shared only one actor with its predecessor (face-of-the-franchise Paul Walker) and the third installment, Tokyo Drift, didn’t even have that much of a vague connection, but instead was only spiritually tethered to the rest of the franchise through the stunt casting of a rapper-turned-actor, in that case (Lil) Bow Wow. I loved Tokyo Drift for its lack of concern with justifying its own existence (and its voracious enthusiasm for driving sideways), but there wasn’t very far for the series to go as a cohesive unit by leaving that film . . . adrift.

The fourth Fast and Furious film, the succinctly titled Fast & Furious, tries to pull the series’ act together by working as retroactive franchise glue. In an opening high speed heist (an immediate callback to the first film), the original Furious couple of Dominic (Vin Diesel) & Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) make their triumphant return to the fold by robbing an 18 wheeler. This time, however, they have a new compatriot in their schemes: Han (Sung Kang), a very important player from Tokyo Drift who (spoiler) is supposed to be very dead. So, what does this mean? Is Fast & Furious supposed to be a prequel to the series? Not quite, since Paul Walker’s undercover cop shenanigans from the first two films have already taken place. So does that make Tokyo Drift a pseudo sci-fi car racing film set sometime in the near future? I buy that. I mean, they were driving sideways. This chronology is not-so-seamlessly (but very much amusingly) set up in an exchange where Vin Diesel’s Dominic tells Han “Time for you to do your own thing.” and Han replies, “I heard they’re doing some crazy shit in Tokyo . . .” They’re doing some crazy shit indeed, Han. First of all, they’re driving sideways.

The problem is that after these first ten minutes of retroactive narrative, Fast & Furious loses its sense of purpose. Setting the undercover police intrigue in the Dominican Republic, the film offers the franchise a new location, but not much else. There’s some nonsense about using liquid nitrogen to pull of heists, the only new toy for the cars is a GPS visualization (that plays into the series’ video game aesthetic, but really, it’s GPS; who cares?), and the movie introduces the idea that Vin Diesel’s Dominic has the ability to mentally reconstruct car crashes based on tire marks, but none of it really amounts to much. For the most part, the action is standard stuff you’d expect in any action franchise: Vin Diesel hanging dudes out of windows by their ankles, Paul Walker chasing criminals down back alleys in his tailored federal agent suit, lots of tumbling cars, etc. The best moment, action wise, is when Diesel does a controlled slide (Tokyo style) under a tumbling 18 wheeler, but that takes place during that saving-grace opening set piece.

Fast & Furious can’t even get its own franchise’s charms right. Besides there being no new shiny toys for the cars (unless you’re especially wowed by GPS), there’s no cartoonish warp speed during the street races, the leering lipstick lesbianism makes too big of a return, and although the rap rock is back (Hispanic rap rock this time) it takes a back seat to relentlessly sappy acoustic guitar work. The main thing it’s missing, however, is a sense of fun. Fast & Furious is just so unnecessarily dour, especially after the cartoonish excess of Tokyo Drift. If there’s one thing you want your mindless car-racing action movies to be it’s fun and Fast & Furious undeniably fails on that front. There’s some mild hilarity in its failure to achieve a serious tone, like in the exchange, “Maybe you’re not the good guy pretending to be the bad guy. Maybe you’re the bad guy pretending to be the good guy. You ever think about that?” “Every day.” For the most part, though, this tone just makes the film unbearable. There are a couple bright spots here or there, like the much-appreciated return of Jordana Brewster & the spectacle of the opening heist, but for the most part Fast & Furious is only concerned with herding the narrative cats of the first three installments. Once that business is out of the way the movie becomes exceedingly difficult to love. Hopefully it’ll serve as a bridge to better movies down the line, but when considered on its own, it’s not really worth its near two-hour runtime.

-Brandon Ledet

The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006)

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Tokyo Drift, the third installment in the Fast and Furious franchise, is not a particularly unique film when considered on its own merit, but it is very much an outlier in the series it’s a part of. The first two Fast and Furious films are undercover police thrillers about trust & family and the criminal world of California street racing. Tokyo Drift, on the other hand, is about a high school reprobate’s struggle to find The Drift within. The Drift, in case you somehow didn’t already know, is the ability to more or less drive sideways, something Japanese teens are apparently very good at. The Drift also serves as some kind of metaphor for growing up or taking responsibility or something along those lines (with a direct reference to The Karate Kid for full effect), but one thing’s for damn sure: it has nothing to do with the world of the Paul Walkers, Vin Diesels and Tyrese Gibsons of the first two films. There’s a hilarious last minute cameo that attempts to tie it into the rest of the series, but for the most part Tokyo Drift is a free-floating oddity, just sort of . . . drifting out on its own, disconnected. It’s also a genuinely fun bit of trash cinema.

Although there’s very little narratively connecting Tokyo Drift to its predecessors, it does share a lot of their surface pleasures: it brings back the rap rock from the first film (with Kid Rock in this case), it adds new toys to the vehicles (this time a revolving sports car vending machine, 3-D paint jobs, and nitros tanks shaped like champagne bottles), and the cars reach the cartoonish, blurred warp speed that the series finds so fascinating (although this time they’re moving sideways). The most important connective tissue here, however, is the stunt casting of a rapper in a supportive role. The first film had Ja Rule, the second had Ludacris. Tokyo Drift has (Lil) Bow Wow, playing a wisecracking sidekick who winks at the camera, delivers one-liners like “Japanese food is like the Army: don’t ask, don’t tell,” and refers to the Mona Lisa as that lady who’s smiling all the time. In the previous two Fast and Furious films Paul Walker served as the only common element between them; in Tokyo Drift, Bow Wow’s stunt casting makes that connection even more tenuous.

Substituting Paul Walker in the central role is the aforementioned teenage reprobate Sean, played by Lucas “The Kid From Sling Blade” Black. Never you mind that Sean is easily in his mid-twenties (and the rest of his American high school classmates are nearing their thirties). He’s a teenage dropout who burns his last chance for redemption in an opening street race with Zachery “The Kid From Home Improvement” Ty Bryan in an attempt to “win” his opponent’s girlfriend. By the time the girlfriend in question declares “Looks like I got a new date to the prom” it’s more than fair for the audience to ask “Who are these people?!” The answer to that question never comes (although their connection to the franchise is hinted at in that all-too-important last second cameo). Saved from going to jail for his street racing transgressions by his leopard print hussy mother, he’s promptly shipped off to Tokyo to live with his military daddy, who really only exists to occasionally give the film some girl group song levity in lines like “It was either this, or juvie hall” and “Have you been racing, Sean?” Sean himself isn’t a particularly essential addition to the Fast and Furious world, but it is amusing to hear him pronounce Japanese words in a thick Southern accent once he reaches “The Drift World” and the idea of a girl-group style teenage bad boy looking for his inner Drift headlining one of these movies is a bizarre enough detail on its own regardless of execution, given how far removed it is from the undercover cop intrigue of the rest of the franchise.

Besides Bow Wow’s antics and Sean’s extended screen time, the real draw of the film is The Drift World itself. There’s an unashamedly trashy pleasure in Tokyo Drift’s world of Japanese sports cars sliding sideways in parking garages and down mountainsides, its Yakuza members who speak English even when they’re the only people in the room, and the live-action videogame feel of its downtown street racing. There’s a few innovations to the format here: it’s surprisingly the first film in the franchise to feature a car being built from scratch via montage; spectators discover a way to watch an entire race through a series of flip phones; this has got to be the only Fast and Furious movie to feature a Shonen Knife song on the soundtrack; and I’m pretty sure that during the opening race a smashed porta potty splashes digital feces on the camera lens. The most entertaining part of Tokyo Drift, however, is how little it is concerned with engaging with the rest of the franchise at all. It’s its own little side story about a young Southern boy trying to make his way through the class struggles of two worlds-apart high school hierarchies. Does he ever find his inner Drift? Yes, but does he get the girl? You betcha. As Sean himself says in the film, “It’s not the ride, it’s the rider,” and Tokyo Drift takes that lesson to heart, using the franchise as a vehicle to create its own space as a ridiculous, surface-pleasures action thriller with some ridiculous one-liners, a car racing fetish, and career high moment for rapper-turned-actor Not-So-Lil Bow Wow. I’m a little surprised by how much that formula worked for me and it ended up being my favorite film in the series so far.

-Brandon Ledet

2 Fast 2 Furious (2003)

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In my review of The Fast and the Furious, 2001’s kickoff to the hyper-masculine car racing franchise, I supposed that somewhere down the line there would be some “sure-to-come shameless retreads inherent to sequels”. The series did not waste any time getting there. 2003’s 2 Fast 2 Furious isn’t necessarily much better or worse than its predecessor, but more like an echo. It hits the same plot points as the original (undercover policing, sports cars reaching warp speed, Paul Walker’s half-assed modes of seduction, etc.) with just a few basic casting substitutions distinguishing the two films. Sure, we’re blessed here with sex god Tyrese Gibson (who wastes little time in removing his shirt, of course) instead of Vin Diesel and a Chicken-N-Beer era Ludacris instead of the much-less-captivating Ja Rule, but the two films are more or less the same. The strange thing about it is that the repetition doesn’t feel like much of a problem.

It’s okay that both The Fast and the Furious and 2 Fast 2 Furious share so much in plot & sentiment because plot & sentiment are inessential to the films’ central draws: absurdly intricate action set pieces, a fetishistic love of sports cars, and charmingly dated ideas of cool. 2 Fast 2 Furious delivers on the action end early, opening with a ridiculous high speed drag race that features hooligans breaking into a bridge control booth to create a makeshift ramp. The ramp, of course, results in Paul Walker leapfrogging the competition as well as a competitor comically smashing through a Pepsi advertisement. Later, in the cop drama portion of the film, a second car is launched into the air (this time into a yacht) and a much more brutal highway race results in some dude driving a convertible being unceremoniously crushed by an 18-wheeler. The vehicles themselves are updated with some nifty new features: weird lights, Barbie car paint jobs, fire-breathing tail pipes, steam-shooting pistons, and nitros-powered ejection seats. The cops have upped their technology game as well, employing a futuristic, electrified grappling hook that somehow disables car engines through a kind of EMP device. As far as the movie’s 00s ideas of cool go, the CGI camera movements are hilariously dated, there’s a not-so-sly verbal reference to Ludacris’ hit “Move Bitch” (which honestly should’ve been the theme song), the Universal logo in the title card morphs into a spinning rim, and in the opening scene we’re treated to the defining hallmark of only the uppermost echelon of classy movies: break dancing.

2 Fast 2 Furious may be an exact structural photocopy of the first Fast & Furious installment, but it has such a deliriously lighthearted approach to the intense violence of its reality (a quality that made 80s action films the golden era of the genre) that it’s difficult to be too hard on it critically. As a cultural time capsule, there are a couple differences between its worldview and the one from just two years before. For one thing, there’s thankfully no more rap rock on the soundtrack and for another there’s an abundantly frequent use of the sharp uptick of the chin gesture that roughly translates to “What’s up?” The sequel also one-ups its torture game from force-feeding someone engine oil in the first picture to forcing a rat to eat through a stooge’s stomach wall in second one. For the most part, the two films are nearly identical, though. Although nearly all of the actors except Walker are substituted for new faces and there’s a complete absence of rap rock, lipstick lesbianism, and backyard grilling, 2 Fast 2 Furious is essentially a shameless retread of its precursor, but it’s one that finds a way to make its more-of-the-same formula entertaining despite the familiarity.

-Brandon Ledet

The Fast and the Furious (1955)

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When I said yesterday that I had yet to see a single Fast & Furious film in full, I wasn’t being 100% honest. I had previously seen the film the series derived its name from, a 1950’s car racing cheapie from Movie of the Month vet Roger Corman. 1955’s The Fast and the Furious is far from Corman’s most interesting film, but it is only the second title (out of hundreds) that he’s produced and the first title produced by American International Pictures, the film company that helped make him a b-movie powerhouse. The film has very little connection to the much-more-infamous Paul Walker series outside of the purchase of its title rights, but that purchase was most certainly worth every penny. It’s a damn good title. Good thing they decided not stick with the much less compelling original name for the film, Crashout.

When considered on its own, The Fast and the Furious doesn’t amount to much. It’s story of an (innocent) escaped convict who comes to hold a female race car driver hostage in hopes that she will drive him to freedom across the Mexican border. At first they bristle at each other’s hostility. In an early exchange, the race car driver, Connie, spits, “I hate you.” Frank, the convict, responds, “Just hate me all the way to Mexico.” There’s a lot of violent sexual energy between the couple that becomes less violent and more sexual as they stop struggling to outsmart each other and start working as a pair in their confrontations with police & other, less forgiving race car drivers. The racing culture of 1950s is portrayed as rich man’s hobby here, which leads to some occasionally interesting class politics in Frank’s interactions with Connie’s circle. This also plays into why Frank was convicted of a crime he didn’t commit in the first place, which is revealed in his line “It isn’t what you are that counts. It’s what you get taken for.”

Filmed in just ten days, The Fast and the Furious is one of many examples of Corman’s superhuman ability to make a surprisingly watchable picture on a tight budget, even if it isn’t a particularly memorable one. It does share some incidental similarities the Paul Walker franchise of the same name, like felons getting mixed up in car racing, racers inspecting/admiring each other’s gear, the featured inclusion of female racers, and (most incidentally of all) mentions of Coachella, California. Both Corman’s film and the 2000s franchise also have a tendency to mix corny comedy in with their criminal intrigue as well as an over-reliance on dated effects (whether they be CGI or driving scenes filmed in front of a projector). Corman’s The Fast and the Furious is by no means essential viewing, but it is an interesting footnote to the trashy cultural powerhouse that followed nearly 50 years later.

The Fast and the Furious (1955) is currently streaming on Netflix.

-Brandon Ledet