A week ago, I had never seen a single Fast and Furious movie, and I was content that things stay that way. After months of being told by suggested article titles in various sidebar links “This franchise isn’t really as bad as you’d think!,” however, my curiosity was finally piqued. What followed was a seven-day odyssey into a world of ten-stacks and drifting, pink slips and NOS, bromance and blatantly pornographic shots of cars. When I emerged at last on the other side, forever changed by what I had seen, I was certain of nothing, save for the unshakeable veracity of these absolute Truths.
Works cited:
- The Fast and the Furious (2001) – Paul Walker teams up with Vin Diesel to take down his criminal gang from the inside but his head is turned by Vin’s sister’s talent for sandwich-making.
- The Turbo-Charged Prelude for 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003) – Paul Walker teams up with a music video director to go on a cross-country road trip.
- 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003) – Paul Walker teams up with Tyrese Gibson to rescue Eva Mendes from a drug dealer by driving a car onto a boat.
- The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006) – Nobody from the first two movies teams up with an unlikable teenage expatriate living in Tokyo.
- Los Bandoleros (2009) – Vin Diesel and Michelle Rodriguez vacation in the Dominican Republic on the studio’s dime.
- Fast & Furious (2009) – The first movie happens again.
- Fast Five (2011) – The gang is hunted by both special agent John “The Dwayne” Rockson and a crime lord whose MacGuffin they have accidentally stolen.
- Furious 6 (2013) – Vin Diesel brings his crew out of retirement to contend with an amnesia plot.
- Furious Seven (2015) – Jason Statham is out for revenge but proves even more inept at it than Emily Thorne.
1. Ignore the people who tell you to watch the movies in chronological order.
Google “fast and furious timeline” and you’ll find no shortage of helpful advice indicating that the fourth, fifth, and sixth films are in fact prequels to film number three, Tokyo Drift. That’s fine information to keep in mind, but as with the Star Wars prequels, if you opt for chronological order over release order you’re just screwing yourself over.
Ignore everyone who says that Tokyo Drift takes place between Fast & Furious 6 and Furious Seven. They’re wrong; it takes place concurrently with the end of part six and the beginning of part seven. The final minutes of Furious 6 actually spoil a key scene from the end of Tokyo Drift by reusing footage from that film. Not to mention that films four, five, and six all contain nods back to film three (“I thought you wanted to get to Tokyo?” someone asks Han Seoul-Oh, the best character from Tokyo Drift, to which he replies, “We’ll get there eventually”).
Just stick to the order the films came out; you’ll spend less time wondering why everyone in Japan was apparently still using flip phones in 2014.
2. Despite a consistent release schedule, it took almost 10 years for this franchise to get off the ground.
Even if you haven’t seen any of the Fast and Furious movies, as I hadn’t, you still have a basic idea of what to expect from them: Paul Walker, Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez, Tyrese, and Ludacris on a high-octane adventure, often involving some sort of heist. That’s what the previews for the past several films have shown us, anyway. But that only takes us back to Fast & Furious (the fourth film) in 2009. The first movie came out in 2001. What the hell were they doing for eight years?
Spinning their wheels, really, but now we can look back on this span of the franchise’s history and charitably call it “worldbuilding.” When Paul Walker, Vin Diesel, and the rest of the Super Friends reunited in 2009’s Fast & Furious to jumpstart the franchise as we know it today, a whole pool of supporting characters from which future films could draw had already been introduced. The Fast and Furious series is like the Marvel movies if they were made by someone with a little more restraint.
Spinning their wheels, really, but now we can look back on this span of the franchise’s history and charitably call it “worldbuilding.” When Paul Walker, Vin Diesel, and the rest of the Super Friends reunited in 2009’s Fast & Furious to jumpstart the franchise as we know it today, a whole pool of supporting characters from which future films could draw had already been introduced. The Fast and Furious series is like the Marvel movies if they were made by someone with a little more restraint.
3. Most truckers would rather commit cold-blooded murder than take an insurance hit.
Look, bros, I know you’re pissed about constantly getting your cargo ripped off by Vin Diesel and his gang, but castle doctrine will only get you so far. Clearly these guys weren’t expecting you to be packing heat; you’ve already made two of them total their cars at 80 miles per hour, and now you’ve got the last dude dangling from the outside of your cab while his arm gets lacerated by wire. I think continuing to fire point-blank shotgun rounds at him is, at this point, a pretty clear-cut case of MURDER.
This is the situation that Paul Walker finds when he returns to save the day. Handing the wheel of his car over to his girlfriend, he climbs out the window as they race down the highway alongside the semi and attempts to disentangle his friend. And the trucker keeps shooting at them! Paul Walker is still a cop at this point, so the trucker would have been extra screwed if he’d been a better shot, but for all he knows he’s trying to blow away some good Samaritan attempting to rescue the guy hanging from the outside of his truck.
The same thing happens again in the opening heist sequence of Fast & Furious. Vin Diesel & Co. are in the process of hijacking a fuel tanker in the Dominican Republic. Suddenly the driver catches sight of Michelle Rodriguez walking along the roof of one of his tankers. I honestly don’t know what my first reaction would be in that situation, but I’m fairly confident it wouldn’t be to immediately speed up and start jerking the car around in an attempt to throw her to her death.
I can see trying to outrun them or fighting back in self-defense, but come on, guys, this isn’t even your own stuff you’re willing to kill over. Were you hired to transport some corporation’s product from one location to another or to protect it with your life? It hardly seems worth it, bros.
4. Vin Diesel can convert any by-the-book cop into an anarchic rogue just by talking to them.
He does it to Paul Walker (twice!), The Rock, and that fluminense lady cop whose name I don’t remember. The Fast and the Furious, as mentioned above, follows Paul Walker as he goes from being an undercover cop investigating truck robberies to an outlaw himself after falling under the sway of Vin Diesel’s magnetic personality.
Fast & Furious (aka the fourth one) almost feels like a reboot of sorts: Paul Walker is once again a cop, Vin Diesel and his crew are once again robbing trucks, everything is back where it started. We watch as Paul and Vin become friends all over again, Paul rekindles his romance with Vin’s sister, and in the end Paul Walker once more turns his back on his badge to save his friend.
The films teach us to expect Paul Walker’s alignment flip-flopping, however. He’s a former car thief and juvenile delinquent, he grew up on the streets and used to run with people like Vin Diesel’s crew. The Rock, on the other hand is introduced as a paragon of legality. He’s Inspector Javert, he’s Lieutenant Gerard. He doesn’t care about the good intentions that led you to break the law; if you broke it, your ass is his.
That is, unless his entire team is killed by drug traffickers and you help him satisfy his blood vendetta. Then he’ll draw down on a lawfully acting army captain when he refuses to set free a dangerous mercenary to save Paul Walker’s kidnapped wife. It’s cool that his character actually has an arc and all, but you’d think he would have at least gotten fired over that one.
Then there’s that fluminense lady cop who tried to arrest Vin Diesel then teamed up with him because she wanted to bone him. I mean who doesn’t though?
5. All the hottest skanks hang out at the drag racing circuit.
You wouldn’t think it, but apparently it’s true. No matter where or what time it is, any drag race will be spectated almost exclusively by impractically clad women (those who aren’t are sweaty bros in muscle shirts). Chief among its artistic achievements is how the Fast and Furious franchise broke new ground by aesthetically blending the illegal street-racing scene with an L.A. nightclub and/or red-light district.
If you look up the word “gratuitous” in the dictionary, you’ll find all the nude scenes from Game of Thrones. If they didn’t have that, though, they’d have a collage of all the ass shots in the Fast and Furious franchise. Even in the United Arab Emirates, where women are routinely stoned to death or flogged for being raped, you can’t have a rockin’ party without dancers in thong bikinis and gold body paint.
Sharia law has no power over Vin Diesel and Paul Walker driving one of the world’s fastest cars off one of the world’s tallest buildings . . . into another of the world’s tallest buildings. #america
It’s not really offensive in the way that Michael Bay draping Megan Fox over a motorcycle is, but for the most part it isn’t that sexy either. At a certain point the level of pandering just becomes comical and you say to yourself, “Oh, I’m watching a movie for 13-year-old boys.” Then you hang your head in shame for not figuring that out back when Vin Diesel drove a car really fast underneath an exploding fuel tanker.
Before his tragic death, I had never heard much talk about Paul Walker except as a punchline about bad acting. Having now seen the franchise that made him a household name, it’s hard to deny that his Hollywood career probably owed more to his being absurdly handsome than to his acting talent. That said, his performance was never a chore to sit through or a distraction that pulled me out of the movie. He always just seemed like a regular dude having a good time.
I mean, with a movie franchise that also stars Vin Diesel, Ludacris, Michelle Rodriguez, and The Rock, you’re not going to the theater expecting to see some Day-Lewis-style method acting. The performances are an afterthought in these movies; besides the action and car porn, the appeal is the interplay of the personalities on-screen.
In that regard, Walker is perfectly adequate as the relatable everyman whose point of view anchors the franchise and makes a believable part of this family of lighthearted, non-emotive outcasts. Let’s be honest, these movies are just dumb fun and everyone involved in making them knows it. Paul Walker just always seems like he’s having a blast doing ridiculous things in dumb movies with his friends. What more can you ask for a part like that?
I watched all seven of these stupid things over the course of a week and still found myself having a real emotional reaction to his sendoff at the end of Furious Seven. I neither knew nor cared anything about him seven days ago, but these goofy movies somehow made me care.
It’s not really offensive in the way that Michael Bay draping Megan Fox over a motorcycle is, but for the most part it isn’t that sexy either. At a certain point the level of pandering just becomes comical and you say to yourself, “Oh, I’m watching a movie for 13-year-old boys.” Then you hang your head in shame for not figuring that out back when Vin Diesel drove a car really fast underneath an exploding fuel tanker.
6. Paul Walker wasn’t really that bad an actor.
Before his tragic death, I had never heard much talk about Paul Walker except as a punchline about bad acting. Having now seen the franchise that made him a household name, it’s hard to deny that his Hollywood career probably owed more to his being absurdly handsome than to his acting talent. That said, his performance was never a chore to sit through or a distraction that pulled me out of the movie. He always just seemed like a regular dude having a good time.
I mean, with a movie franchise that also stars Vin Diesel, Ludacris, Michelle Rodriguez, and The Rock, you’re not going to the theater expecting to see some Day-Lewis-style method acting. The performances are an afterthought in these movies; besides the action and car porn, the appeal is the interplay of the personalities on-screen.
In that regard, Walker is perfectly adequate as the relatable everyman whose point of view anchors the franchise and makes a believable part of this family of lighthearted, non-emotive outcasts. Let’s be honest, these movies are just dumb fun and everyone involved in making them knows it. Paul Walker just always seems like he’s having a blast doing ridiculous things in dumb movies with his friends. What more can you ask for a part like that?
I watched all seven of these stupid things over the course of a week and still found myself having a real emotional reaction to his sendoff at the end of Furious Seven. I neither knew nor cared anything about him seven days ago, but these goofy movies somehow made me care.
7. The Rock perpetually secretes baby oil from his pores.
Seriously, he is so goddamn shiny.
Like a statue of David carved out of Vaseline.
So, for the second time, [the Pharisees]
summoned the man who had been blind and said:
“Speak the truth before God.
We know this fellow is a sinner.”
“Whether or not he is a sinner, I do not know,”
the man replied.
“All I know is this:
once I was blind and now I can see.”
John IX, 24-26
the New English Bible
the New English Bible
