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.
I actually like watching these…yeah, most of them especially the later ones are absurd. The 1st one is by far the best though. I was actually able to go on the F and F RIDE a few months ago at Universal Orlando, and it was fun (It was the same spot as the old ride “Earthquake”) You would just ride through in a sort of train car and were surrounded by CGI w/ a scene playing out. It was so stupid that it was so funny; that I laughed so hard that I cried!
Countertake: I think this entire movie series is hot garbage and the “street racing” crowd is even worse.
+1
I second that.
Unfortunately, there are many people out there that love to consume garbage.
Someone put on their sassy pants this morning…
I agree with Vin on this. As someone who would also rather watch any of the FnF movies he’s in over most MCU films, I also think they’ve gone wayy too far outside the possibilties of even cartoon physics in the last 3 or 4 films. I still dislike nr. 2 and wasn’t a huge fan of Tokyo Drift when it was released (I prefered the jackass/boken lizard Dukes of Hazzard film) but I’ve realized later that Tokyo Drift is the only film in the series that had a story focuses on young adults tuning and racing cars on the street, no cops and robbers or secret agents.
The 5th movie starting with Brian tripping a prison bus with a Charger (and surviving) sending the bus rolling down the highway, not in an attempt to kill but to save(!) Dom, really set the tone for the following films when it comes to pure disregard for physics. They are like live action remakes of the Roadrunner series now.
And while the plots and story has been pretty consistently awful they have mostly been fun (nr 4 tries a bit too hard to be serious, and the last is too much of a comedy to have that much blatant murder in it) and certainly a spectacle to watch on a big screen.
It’s a bit hard to feel for characters that we know are immortal (Dom literally turns and snares like an animal at a guy shooting him in the 8th or 9th film, and the ones who die usually return ) but at least Roman notices this and have some funny lines about this.
I literally laughed out loud several times in a theatre full of strangers watching the last 2 films. Which is mildly out of character for an aspie with social anxiety.
They are no match for any George Miller film when it comes to seriousness or cultural importance or overall quality, but they also don’t wave the US flag and portray toxic masculinity as a virtue the way many Michael Bay films do. (I say this as a huge transformers fan. I even have the Lego Optimus Prime)
At least so far they haven’t risked their lives to get parts for a time machine to travel forwards in time to barely have time to stop Genisys.
When where they ever about REAL racing? Unless all that “danger to manifold ” and 17 speed manual transmission was real?
17 speed manual 😀 thank you. Take your star.
And the worlds longest quarter mile