I don’t know that I take anything as seriously as Vin Diesel seems to take everything, so I don’t think that Vin Diesel is at all joking when he posted on Thanksgiving that he just wants to “get back to real street racing, practical stunts… and a reunion of that beautiful brotherhood” in the Fast and Furious series that made him a global movie star.
If you didn’t know, I am the resident Fast and the Furious fan in the Autopian office. In general, I’d rather watch any Fast and Furious movie than any MCU film made post-Ant Man. The Fast and the Furious series of films has way better cars and requires less homework to enjoy. Plus, the humor of most of these films is quite underrated.
All that being said, I will grant that the movies have taken a hard turn from car crime caper to universal spy film. Having watched the films both in release order and in the proper, canonical order, (starting with Justin Lin’s Better Luck Tomorrow and including the Diesel-directed short Los Bandoleros) I have a lot of opinions about the franchise and all of them are correct.
The series has a great start with the patently ridiculous and entirely enjoyable The Fast And The Furious, which then immediately detours with the Diesel-less 2 Fast, 2 Furious, which is a fairly conventional sequel, though it does give us Tyrese and Ludacris, who are like the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of the franchise. It then detours again with a new cast that lands us in Tokyo for Fast And The Furious Three: Tokyo Drift. That one briefly includes Diesel as Dom Toretto and introduces Han (which also throws the films out of order). Eventually, Fast & Furious brings all of the main crew together for a fourth film. That movie gets a little dark, but is generally about a bunch of street racers doing crime or doing good or doing crime for good.
Where it gets ridiculous is in Furious 7, which sees the crew teaming up with Kurt Russel and a spy agency. This isn’t to say the movies aren’t enjoyable, as both Charlize Theron and Jason Statham are a lot of fun, but I think the moment where they have to use a bunch of cars to disable a nuclear sub that they lost me a little bit. It turns out, Vin Diesel agrees (link if you can’t see this post):
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Here’s the full quote if Instagram is weird for you:
I got universal in one ear saying we need FastX2 by March 2026!
I have Comcast in the other ear saying we need two movies to be the Finale!
Then the writer on Fast Five sent me this image and said we need to see DOM and HOBBS resolve their differences.
I just want to get back to real street racing, practical stunts… and a reunion of that beautiful brotherhood.
Happy Thanksgiving…
First of all, I’m like 90% sure that this is actually the speech that Vin Diesel gave before cutting open the turkey at Thanksgiving dinner. I mean, can’t you imagine it? He’s got a printed-out photo of himself and The Rock in one had, a Corona in the other, and he’s explaining to his family that he misses “that beautiful brotherhood.”
The bit about “real street racing” itself is a little funny considering that, even in the first film, some of the car talk was utter nonsense (ahem, DANGER TO MANIFOLD). And that’s before they turned a Pontiac Fiero into a space shuttle.
I get what he means, though, about the practical stunts. The driving in the films is always excellent and the most fun moments are also the least fake, like in Furious 7 when the crew chased a bunch of buses up Pikes Peak:
So, yeah. I’m kind of with Vin Diesel. Let’s bring the Fast And Furious franchise back to its roots.
Faaamiiilyyy
Fastx2: Real Street Racing – By ESBMW
After buying 3 Spoon engines and T66 turbos. He’s thousands of dollars in debt after putting it all on his Visa. He goes to RaceWars2001, he’s in the semi finals. He lines up for his round. Blows a intercooler coupler right of line. He’s out of the money. He goes home, tells his wife. His spouse is like “what the hell is a Spoon Engine, and you spent how much”. They’re trying to move to Costa Mesa and start a family. She can’t take it anymore and divorces him. He takes a second job managing an oil change place to pay off his now 6 figure debt. 10 years later, he’s at work. Tired, doing another 70 hour week. Dom comes in and says “Getting the family back together, want to drive a Suzuki Sidekick to Siberia. We’re taking down an ISIS sleeper cell”. Hector is like “No, what the hell is wrong with you”. He thinks his friend has gone crazy. But he misses street racing. He goes out that night looking to race in his turbo hatch. All the kids just do sideshows now, and no one will race him. He goes home and cries in his EK in the driveway.
A Fiero in space gave me the same sick feeling as Ewoks in Return of the Jedi. “I wasn’t ashamed of the franchise, until now.”
Does anyone actually care about the movie itself? It’s really just about the cars.
Some reviews even said so directly: “It’s all about the cars. Why even bother reviewing the movie?”
To play a little devils advocate – there is a semblance of plotting about the importance of relationships. Yeah, once we hear Dom mumble “fambly…” one too many times we know it’s all downhill from there, but at least at the beginning, it did kind of artfully try.
After all, while Bullitt is remembered primarily for the chase, it’s actually also a very tight neo noir obsessed with the idea of professionalism. McQueen, sure, but also the hitmen/drivers, the doctors, pretty much everyone but Robert Vaughan’s gloriously slimy politician.
Thank you! Bullitt is noir. I even watched it in black and white once and it worked.
Bullitt would work just as well without the car chase. It’s also one of the first hollywood movies where a policeman is an anit-hero.
I actually liked the one in Brasil quite a bit.
What was the one where they managed to stage a car in the middle OF FUCKING ADMIRALTY ARCH IN CENTRAL LONDON LIKE THIRTY FEET FROM NO 10 DOWNING STREET.
Like that wouldn’t have Dom and gang finding themselves licking tarmac on the unfunny end of tens of MP5s in short fucking order.
Not that I’m in any position to criticize anyone else’s dumb movie enjoyment (and honestly, I’d usually rather watch dumb shit that’s fun than some depressing Oscar bait), but even as someone who grew up on Creature Double Feature schlock horror and sci-fi movies and continued watching bad movies with friends in high school on a monthly bad movie night, these were too stupid even for me to enjoy and I only saw the first and the third one in their entirety with some inescapable scenes from others. Some of it is that I can’t stand CGI-focused action movies. As backgrounds or pieces of scenes, it can work seamlessly or I don’t mind where it’s presented more like an animation, but it just doesn’t work for me when it’s pretty much the focal point of a scene. The go-motion effects of Dragonslayer from 1981 hold up better than the later F&F CGI scenes I’ve seen and I’d rather watch stop-motion than bad CGI. Funny thing is, so would be nieces, who are under 10. I showed them Medusa from the original Clash of the Titans (far better than the more recent POS) after they saw a Medusa lamp I made and asked what she was. They then wanted to see more scenes like that (thanks, Youtube). Of course, it doesn’t help that it’s a rare car movie that I like in the first place, I hate winking self aware bad movies, and modern bloated action movies that they blow $200M to make and refuse to hire writers with actual talent. I think for this franchise, it’s not quite dumb enough that I can ignore the stupidity and enjoy it (maybe involving cars is the problem) and far too dumb to take seriously. Like, I can watch a giant ape and giant dinosaur that breathes fire battle other giant monsters in a hollow Earth and shut my brain off*, but I just can’t for the F&F.
*This only works once—I made the mistake of buying the first one and my brain refused to shut down for a second viewing.
The one thing I never figured out* is that Dom’s car was an FD RX-7. The Charger was his dad’s and Dom was afraid to drive it. Then it became his signature car in all future movies.
*This excludes that constant shifting and radical shift pattern these cars must have.
Right? That’s what made the end of the original so well done, that he busts out the weapon he’d been heretofore afraid to wield. It was like the shark in Jaws…so much more of an impact b/c we saw so little of it.
Any car movie is alright with me. I badly need a car that always has one more gear to even faster. You know, Ludacris speed.
I’m right there with you, Matt. I love this franchise and watch every one with my aunt, who has no interest whatsoever in cars but loves the movies. The later movies are so camp and just become parodies of themselves and the whole big-budget Hollywoo action movie trope.
The car spotting and custom cars are a delight to watch on a big screen. The stunts may be a lot of CGI, but so many of the cars exist and are characters, themselves. From Brian’s silver R34 to the ramp car to the carbon fiber mid-engined Charger.
I saw and heard the Hellacious SpeedKore Charger startup in person. The blast from the exhaust knocked down a display rack a few feet away. What a treat.
I’ve only seen part of Tokyo Drift, but the films are pervasive enough I get the gist and am aware of when they turned into spy movies with cars. It seems to me that Vin would have little trouble starting his own franchise if he really wanted.
I’m in the boat with you Matt. I enjoy them all, even the campiest of the new ones. A guilty pleasure, full of all my favorite types of eye candy. But I would not cry if they found a way to get back to their roots.
I just want them to end the story at this point.
The series never focused on street racing. The first movie was about an undercover rookie cop trying to stop a bunch of Honda Civics from stealing random stuff from truckers.
The second was taking an ex-cop and his old street racer buddy and using them to stop a drug trafficker.
The third was about a 17-year-old losing his chance of driving legally in the US and choosing to go live in Japan instead of going to jail, getting involved with a Yakuza-filled(!) drift scene.
The main attraction to the franchise is the cars and stunts. That’s it. Definitely not “street racing”.
This is probably why I never connected with the films out of this series that I did see. The vast majority of the cars just weren’t what appealed to me. I’m not a fan of pretentious, flashy, riced-out imports. The MR2 Spyder in the 2nd film was cool though, but it saw very little screen time. And the stunts were mostly laughable. And I’ve seen adult films with better writing.
Most of the F&F films’ stunts were fake or CGI-laden, and often impossible. I also laugh at the 1/4 mile drag race between Vin Diesel’s and Paul Walker’s characters toward the end of the first film for being so horribly stretched out.
Want real stunts and speed? Watch the first Mad Max film. There was no CGI, and when the stunt rider was doing 180 km/h on that Kawasaki KZ1000, you could see it on the speedometer. In the case of the chase scene between Max and The Toecutter, that scene was filmed at 160 km/h and the footage was then sped up to make it look even faster. Subsequent films in this series just weren’t the same, and no one could get away with filming stuff like this these days.
I think it was the 8th movie but there was a scene on a runway where, if calculated correctly, the runway would have to be at least 10 miles.
I haven’t seen that film but I’m aware of that scene thanks to this site from an article published 2.5 years ago, and I do believe it was the 6th film.
https://www.theautopian.com/i-wasnt-sure-if-i-wanted-to-write-about-this-viral-video-of-a-flying-nuclear-fusion-powered-hotel-but-its-just-too-stupid-to-ignore/comment-page-1/#!
Absurd inconsistencies like this drive me away from a film when it takes itself seriously, and I tend to notice them. As a teenager, I found the first film laughable, while my classmates tried to imitate things from the movie with their cars on public roads. They knew nothing of automobile physics or how long it took to actually go through a quarter mile.
At least Fury Road used real stunts, even if they were conducted at laughably slow speeds. George Miller knows how to blend CGI and practical effects fairly seamlessly. Tom Hardy was not fond of participating in said stunts and could be the lynchpin that prevents subsequent films in the series. Of course, Mel Gibson is too old…
That’s why Tokyo Drift remains one of the best in the series.
Except for scenes where they were focused on the actors faces, they actually went out and drifted all the cars.
After CGI started to ruin movie car stunts, I kinda lost interest. I guess I’ll always have Blues Brothers and Cannonball Run.
Surely you’ve seen the original Gone in 60 Seconds?
Im not saying that correlation implies causation, but once Paul Walker passed the movies did jump the shark. or the sub, what have you.
I don’t recall which movie it was where I gave up completely on the franchise, but I recall it had them dragging a bank vault in South America (Brazil maybe?). I was never much enamored with the franchise, but I just couldn’t be bothered to watch any more of the films after the silly nonsense blundered past where my brain could suspend the disbelief. I get what VIN Diesel is saying for sure, but at the same time the idea that the franchise ends soon sounds great to me.
Oh man, I love that scene because in order to achieve the effect of two cars dragging a giant safe through the streets of Rio, they had two cars drag a giant safe through the streets of San Juan, Puerto Rico. They wrecked like 200 cars for that chase scene. I believe CGI was only used for certain shots of breaking glass & other debris that would have put the background players in too much danger.
I seem to recall seeing some promotional behind-the-scenes footage that the safe was actually fake and sitting on top of a pickup truck chassis so they could drive it behind the Chargers.
https://jerrygarrett.wordpress.com/2011/05/03/fast-five-how-the-bank-vault-stunt-was-filmed/
The original is the best b/c at its heart, it’s a peek into a subculture of life that believably exists just outside the regular world most of the rest of us inhabit. It’s wild of course, but it’s within the realm of possibility from our pov. We connect with it b/c we can envision the characters living in their subculture.
The sequels then get increasingly preposterous largely b/c that subculture is then turned into the regular culture, and that doesn’t make much sense to us b/c our world is nothing like that.
They’re pure automotive porn, in every sense of the term.
The Mission: Impossible series suffers from the same thing, but it’s not as bad as Cruise and co don’t have a single gimmick they use to accomplish their goals every time.
For the record, I like number 2 b/c it’s basically Miami Vice. Or, if you want a more contemporaneous example, Fastlane.
“Better” doesn’t mean “good”…
The last F&F movie I watched was 2016’s Star Trek Beyond.
The last one I watched was the Futurama episode where Farnsworth souped up the Planet Express Ship and used dimensional drift.
I don’t watch anything after Tokyo Drift because after Tokyo Drift cars aren’t the focus, they’re the lure. The cars are just the tool used to tell the wider angsty spy-thriller instead of being what the movie’s about.
In the first movie it’s cars as connections between people and how car culture can bridge gaps. In the second movie it’s about how cars are a common force that can re-establish those connections. In the third movie it’s about how cars bring freedom and a sense of self-expression.
In the fourth movie it’s “Cars fit in the tunnel, see?”
Also I’ve never seen Vin turn down a movie yet, so it’s almost entirely on him past the fifth movie for the franchise continuing. He’s the face of it all at this point.
Agree – I said something similar above. While I appreciate the series’ continued use of deep-cut enthusiast cars (Ford Escort RS1600!) as that’s way cooler than modified VW Jettas or whatever, the movies have become the equivalent of the Superfriends (sorry, the “Justice League) just letting Superman solve all the problems all the time.
The quickest way to tell what the movies become about is to ask someone to name three cars from each movie. In the first movie they’ll talk about Bryan’s Eclipse, Jesse’s Jetta, and the Ten Second Supra. In the second movie they’ll talk about Bryan’s R34 Skyline and Lancer Evolution VII and Roman’s Eclipse, though if they’re really into the film they’ll mention Suki’s S2000. In the third movie they’ll mention the Veilside FD3S RX-7, the Mona Lisa S14 Silvia, and fight between whether the Silviustang, Twinkie’s Touran, or DK’s Z33 Fairlady Z should be third. From the fourth movie onwards the only thing they’ll be able to remember is Dom’s Chargers, and maybe the Ramp Car from the sixth movie.
Didn’t they have a sub breaking through the ice in one movie?
Yeah, they need to get back to the early film style. Like doing 100mph and driving under a semi truck trailer….yeah the more realistic stuff.
National Lampoon’s Fast & Furious: The Chevy Chase
Fast & Furious 11’s: Street Takeover
Hellcat brah!