The Fast and the Furious came out in 2001. This series is twenty years old. Twenty glorious years.
So this series ranks as one of my five favorite movies. I'm counting it as one very long movie, because c'mon. It kind of is. (The other four: The Matrix, Edge of Tomorrow, The Last Jedi, Thor: Ragnarok.) This month is the ninth of the series--they'll end at eleven, though apparently Vin Diesel has indicated there might be spin-offs.
This series is inclusive as hell. First of all, for a couple of years anyway, it was believably in California. (Occasionally it still is.) Its mainstay stars are mostly BIPOC, two of which are women. (Technically four, but we only ever get two of them at a time, really.) Oh, there's a token white guy. It's unfortunate there aren't any queer characters, but to be fair, these are also movies fully embracing toxic masculinity. (As time goes on, that toxic masculinity becomes a running joke, which is fascinating.)
There are also plentiful close-up shots of bikini-clad asses, and only once in a while do we get to see the actual people to which they belong. Sigh.
The Fast and the Furious, 10 June 2021, streamed via HBO Max
These guys started out stealing DVD players from moving trucks and back then, it seemed so impressive. How young we all were. Also, holy crap, I forgot they supposedly owned a diner. A diner. What the hell?
It's pretty fun to see how this movie is written to make Brian (Paul Walker) and his romance with Mia (Jordana Brewster) the thing we care about, and instead it ends up being all about Brian being ensorcelled by Dom (Vin Diesel) instead.
"You can have any beer you want...as long as it's a Corona." LOL. But the cars parked on the street for the house party is the most California thing in this entire movie. After the desert rave, I mean. And the backyard barbecue. (That they keep those in every movie, I think, is one of my favorite things about the series.)
The number of white dudes in Dom's Southern California street racing crew is unrealistic, but to be fair, they mortally injured off a couple of them (the intensely homophobic one and the one inexplicably racing a Jetta) and we never see the others ever again.
"I live my life a quarter mile at a time. Nothing else matters, not the mortgage, not the store, not my team and all their bullshit. For those ten seconds or less, I'm free."
2 Fast 2 Furious, 11 June 2021, streamed via HBO Max
Ah, 2 Fast 2 Furious, the most riffed-on movie sequel name after whatever the Electric Boogaloo one was. This is, as most know, the weakest one of the entire series--mostly because they didn't quite get what the deal really was. Like, they thought we cared about Brian and his identity crisis? In fact, we do not. On the other hand, this is the movie that pulled Tyrese and Ludacris into the fold, so blessed it be.
What happened to Devon Aoki's Suki? Alas, 'tis unknown. (And Michael Ealy and Amaury Nolasco! In very caricatured roles, oof.) Suki, man, seriously. Check this queen.
Roman will quickly become the most reliable comic relief of the series, mostly for his easily shaken bravado and his constant hunger. As in, if there is food, he will take it. Anyway when Brian mentioned they're from Barstow, I legit shouted, "Of course you are!" at my TV.
I don't know what they're trying to do, making Eva Mendes's Monica Fuentes a love interest as if Mia Torreto doesn't exist. NICE TRY.
Despite everything, I think this is my favorite heist getaway in the series. It's fun. No physics-defying feats, no high-tech chicanery. Just a lot of people driving a lot of cars at once. (I mean, the thing with the boat happens later, but my point still stands.)
The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, 12 June 2021, DVD
Okay, so this one vies with 2 Fast for the title of worst, but edges out as better solely because it introduces Sung Kang's Han AND THUS plays a vital role in the franchise. If we're thinking timeline, this one takes place after the sixth movie and overlaps with the seventh. Apparently Han was so popular that they didn't want to build a universe without him.
(And, as you all know, I will forgive many things if the cast is majority non-white, and oh man, this is it right here. There's some caricatures, of course, but when 96% percent of the cast is Japanese, it was bound to happen. You win some, you lose some.)
Uh, spoiler alert: Han dies. It's a whole hero's journey thing where the mentor dies before the protag can fully come into their own powers? Our alleged protag, Sean (played by Lucas Black) is a high schooler perilously close to 18 and just committed what's probably his third strike. His mother strikes a deal with The Law that Sean has to go live with his father in Japan for a while, or something? He's not so much deported as, like, fleeing the country to avoid jail, but everyone knows about it?
He starts high school in Japan, gets into local street racing, and OF COURSE, gets in trouble with the frickin' YAKUZA. OF COURSE. Anyway, Han takes Sean under his wing to teach him a whole new way of racing: Drifting.
If you're racing in parking garages and on mountain roads, you gotta take your turns a little differently. After Sean wrecks Han's car, he starts running errands (Han is, in some way, yakuza adjacent) in order to repay him; Han teaches Sean how to drift. The best part of the drifting montages is a shot of a couple of older dudes talking trash about Sean's driving.
As should be expected, Sean gets befriended by the two other gaijin at the school, Twinkie (Bow Wow) and Neela (Nathalie Keely). Neela is dating the yakuza kid, DK (Brian Tee), so of course she and Sean fall in love. "Why don't you find a nice Japanese girl like every other white guy here?" Oh daaaaaamn that is some colonialist truthing there, Han, thank you.
Oh, guys, for real, I love this song: "Tokyo Drift" by Teriyaki Boyz. It's what walks us into the street racing scene, except it's parking garage racing, technically.
Oh, and clock Twinkie's car, y'all. How does it not have its own movie?
Remember in 2 Fast how Roman always talked about being hungry? Han's always eating. It's a thing.
So Han had some side hustle and DK gets in trouble with his yakuza uncle for it and then things get messy. Han's car blows up and we're supposed to think it's an accident during some too-aggressive racing with DK. (Little do we know.) To avenge Han or something, Sean challenges the yakuza to a race and I DO NOT KNOW, GUYS, JUST GO WITH IT. Anyway, there's a big race scene and Sean wins, because there is some Last Samurai bullshit going down, *eyeroll*
Sorry, I got distracted looking at HD pics of Han.
AND THEN DOMINIC TORETTO SHOWS UP.
Fast & Furious, 13 June 20212, Blu-ray
Okay, so this title is pretty confusing, but whatever. We start out with the crew once again hijacking a truck, except they're in the Dominican Republic, and oh, HAN IS ALIVE. I mean, we've technically just gone back in time. After the first couple of scenes, Han decides to move to Tokyo, because the writers are fond of irony, I guess.
And we're 100% bilingual! We only get subtitles some of the time and I love it when languages don't get translated, guys. You know this. You don't know Spanish? Then they're not talking to you.
Dom's still on the run from the law and Letty's right along with him, even though he keeps telling her to save herself, because he's that kind of dude. Obvs, as soon as she takes off as per Dom's request, she gets murdered. The way you do. So Dom returns for Letty's funeral and turns out Letty was driving for a narco and Dom goes fully Humperdinck when he visits the crash site.
Brian is now...in the FBI? Dude's in LA parkouring in a suit, wth. (But Liza Lapira is in this! As his partner! Represent, girl! Though they seem to be pretending she's Vietnamese? C'mon.) It's five years after the first movie and I guess The Law is surprisingly forgiving of Brian getting flipped like, what, three times? That is not a dude I would count on to enforce the law.
You know who else works for Braga the narco?? WONDER WOMAN. That's right, friends, Gal Gadot is here.
Both Brian and Dom go undercover, obvs. They're hired to, uh, drive through a tunnel under the Mexico-US border during a two-minute window when border patrol thermal imaging isn't working. Why not? They work out their trust issues while escaping death or whatever.
Dom, unfortunately, does not get exonerated as the FBI had promised. And Brian, fed up with the moral cowardice of law enforcement, once again goes rogue. He must be 100% fired by now, right? We end the movies as the crew is on the way to break Dom out.
Fast Five, 14 June 2021, Blu-ray
We start exactly where the last movie stopped. Brian has gone full outlaw. And PERD HAPLEY happens!
The crew splits up and flees to Brazil because Vince, one of the disappeared white dudes from the first movie, apparently lives there. (Adding Portuguese to our list of franchise languages, huzzah.) How do any of these guys cross borders? Like, seriously. Also, MIA IS PREGNANT. Vince immediately convinces Brian and Mia to join in on a heist.
And if we're still debating about Mia being down with a life of crime, it turns out she carries around a list of countries that don't allow extradition. So I guess they've decided they're committed to the life? I feel like there are other options out there, but.
HEIST HEIST HEIST
Dom shows up, they double-cross the dudes actually running the heist, as it turns out they're heisting from the DEA. Oh, there's a bit where Dom and Brian drive a convertible off a bridge and, FYI, this once inspired me to say the funniest thing I've ever said whilst watching a movie:
O HAI DWAYNE THE ROCK JOHNSON
We get Elena Neves, too, continuing with the franchise tradition of women who will look extremely pretty as they maim you. She's supposedly the translator for Hobbs (AKA The Rock), but she's more like the local who knows everything that needs knowing.
The fam decides they're gonna pull One Last Job: robbing the crap out of Reyes, local corporate warlord. SO WE'RE GETTING THE BAND TOGETHER. For the first time!
Han. Roman. Tej. Santos and Leo. Gisele. A new era begins!
In perhaps the last vestige of reality ever, they actually do some training for the heist first. I mean, they do it with cars every single one of them seem to consecutively win in the Rio street race scene, but I think we can all come to terms with that, right? (Then they steal a bunch of police cars. And race them. I love these dumbass folks.)
Delightfully, they confirm that Gisele is Israeli (as Gadot is) by having Han observe she must have been in the Mossad previously. And then Gisele gets Reyes's handprint by getting him to grab her ass, because this is Fast and the Furious, have you met before?
Poor Vince. Poor, dead Vince. At least his partner and kid (Nico, named after Dom, aw) are now under Toretto family protection. It comes with a fancy car, international safe houses, and the odd million dollars once in a while. But hey, Vince's brave sacrifice brings Hobbs and Elena into the fold, AS WAS FATED.
"I'll ride with you, Toretto."
And the heist! Guys! They just hooked on and towed the vault!
And then had a dupe vault to fake out authorities! This is a thing! That they did! Hobbs, unfortunately, gives them a 24-hour headstart before he realizes.
And thus the pattern for the rest of the franchise is set. These movies, y'all. Physics will soon not apply.
ALSO.
AND.
Fast & Furious 6, Blu-ray
We open with what looks like a direct continuation of the last movie, in that Dom and Brian are racing somewhere where the ocean looks like it's never been near humans before. But then Mia is giving birth! Also, we start out with Dom and Elena clearly in a relationship, and guys, Elena is pretty damn cool when it turns out Letty might be alive. ("If it was my husband," she points out. Girl, you are the best.)
Since Elena's flipped to hang with Toretto, Hobbs's new right hand is Riley, played by Gina Carano. (Ah, the Gina Carano problem: When every character she plays is a direct inverse of how shitty she seems in real life.) Anyway, it's only the second scene, but they're already signaling physics has left the building, as Hobbs straight-up picks up a dude and flings him through a wall. And ceiling. There is structural damage.
So Hobbs is trying to track down a criminal named Owen Shaw (one of four Shaws, but those are movies for another time) and his crew and Letty's one of 'em. TIME TO GET THE BAND BACK TOGETHER. Roman and Tej and, separately, doing pretty much what you'd expect--private jets, Ferrarris, and many, many women. Brain and Mia are ADORABLE with baby Jack. Leo and Santos are, I don't know, not in this movie, I guess.
Gisele and Han are in China or, at least, somewhere where Cantonese is spoken. Han wants to settle down and start a life together because he's never heard of goddamn ironic foreshadowing.
Be with me forever, you two.
The crew agree to get Shaw if Hobbs can get them fully pardoned. They miss Los Angeles, okay? So they head to London where it turns out, yes, Letty is alive, but OH NO, she does not remember any of them! Like, she straight-up shoots Dom. Awkward.
At first, our crew is like, wait, we usually wreck law enforcement and drug dealers! But Hobbs knows: They're specialists. Specialists who really, really love to steal cars from assholes. (Some dude hit them up with racist-ass bullshit, so they did that thing where they crush the privileged with the powers of their Superior Capitalism.)
I know there's something to be said about how this series relies on the caricature of Strong Female Characters in order to distract us from the relentless close-ups of anonymous women's asses, but guys, I am the target demographic for this, I can't help myself.
Meanwhile, all the boys are handsome, surprisingly but only mostly competent idiots. It's like this is a world that I created all for myself.
They huuuungry.
Oh, hey, Rita Ora is in this. Why? *shrug*
I don't really care about Letty and Dom, but the scene where they share all their scars is kind of sweet.
And this is a half-second joke, but probably the best one.
We get to the requisite freeway shenanigans and hilariously, the crew gets nervous because, "They got a tank." Oh, boys. Little do you know what the future has in store. (This is the same summer that Man of Steel came out. When, in this scene, Dom orders, "Take their attention away from the people," there was a hilarious review somewhere that's like, Thank god SOMEBODY cares about bystanders.)
And then Han and Gisele decide they're going to settle down in Tokyo, because the people who wrote this script are MONSTERS.
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Mia gets kidnapped, there's a fight in a plane that seems to be rolling down that runway for about half an hour, and then Gisele dies in order to save Han's life while they're grounding the plane. Han throws the dude she was trying to stop straight into one of the plane's engine because HOW DARE.
She falls all the way to Themyscira.
There's a thing where Dom drives his car straight through a plane. That seems like something a Toretto can do.
Elena goes back to working with Hobbs, Letty thanks Elena for being awesome and supportive, and isn't that a nice change from every other movie and TV show we've ever seen?
Anyway, they got their pardons, so it's family barbecue time! And if you wait until the mid-credits scene, you get to see Owen Shaw's brother kill Han in Tokyo Drift WTF.
Furious 7, 16 June 2021, Blu-ray
So this is the movie being filmed when Paul Walker died. As you can imagine, that drastically changed a lot of things. (IIRC, they had Walker's brother as a stand-in for scenes he hadn't filmed yet.)
So we start a little bit back in time. Owen Shaw of the last movie is in a coma and his big brother, Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham) has vowed revenge. Meanwhile, Letty is back with the crew, but she doesn't have much of her memory still. So Dom takes her to Race Wars and Iggy Azalea is there? This franchise is bonkers sometimes.
Meanwhile, Brian's driving a minivan and he is struggling with it. (The kid's a toddler now. He's adorable.) MIa's pregnant with a second kid, but she doesn't want to tell Brian yet--she knows he's having trouble coming to terms with family life.
Our newest Shaw gets the info on the team (almost blowing up Hobbs and Elena in the process) and kills Han in Tokyo, goddamnit. He also sends a bomb to the Toretto homestead, but they escape in the nick of time. (Brian's got a lot of almost-died scenes in this movie and if those were all written in the script prior to Walker's death, lordy.) Mia and Jack get sent to, I don't know, a warlord in the Dominican Republic? Who are these people?
They splice in the end of Tokyo Drift because Dom goes to Tokyo to pick up Han's body. Hilariously, despite it being, like, a decade later, Lucas Black looks about the same age. Also, one of the only things Han left behind? A picture of Gisele, YOU MONSTERS.
Kurt Russell shows up and introduces himself as Mr Nobody. WHAT THE HELL. What happened to stealing DVD players? He hires the crew to find a hacker named Ramsey who created an uber-surveillance thing called God's Eye. This leads to them dropping the crew from an airplane, in their cars. And then there's a thing with a bus falling off the cliff and Brian had to jump from it and agggghhhhhh. (Djimon Hounsou plays some warlord who is involved in this somehow. Eh.)
Turns out Ramsey is Missandei, so that's pretty cool. I know her makeup is supposed to signal she's been crying in terror, but I actually kind of dig it.
So we head to Abu Dhabi, where these gorgeous weirdos get all dressed up.
Letty gets in a fight with Ronda Rousey.
Dom and Brian drive a car through the Etihad Towers and apparently it's "the most plausible stunt in the whole movie". I ain't even mad about it. Probably the car distracted me, 'cuz daaaaaaamn.
TIME TO UNLEASH THE BEAST.
They go back to Los Angeles because the warlord is trying to kill Ramsey, so they just, like, drive around the city, passing her from car to car. As you do? (You cannot do this in Los Angeles, guys. I'll believe in the car parachutes before I accept a high-speed hot potato within Los Angeles proper. AND A PREDATOR DRONE, which is still more realistic than an empty car garage, no lies.) Shaw and Dom get into a street fight (again, no friggin' way the street would be that empty) and Hobbs flexes his way out of a cast.
But could I find a "Someone just double-tapped our drone" gif? Sigh.
Dom flies his car so he can deliver a bag full o' grenades into a helicopter. His heart stops. CPR doesn't work, but Letty telling unconscious Dom that she remembers they got married and that works. Okay, sure. Oh, and Mia and Brian are out of The Life for real now.
And the last scene, complete with a goddamn montage set to "See You Again." YOU MONSTERS.
I saw this in a packed theater and everybody was sobbing, man. I hadn't heard that much sobbing since the last Harry Potter movie.
I'M NOT CRYING YOU'RE CRYING
The Fate of the Furious, 17 June 2021, Blu-ray
I, too, am aghast they didn't opt for the obvious The F8 of the Furious. C'mon, guys. You're really going to commit to dignified spelling after a decade?
We start in Cuba and Dom's cousin is having his crappy car repossessed, so Dom challenges the repo dude to a race. Driving said crappy car. Obviously he wins. I mean, the car catches on fire and he drives it into the ocean, but he wins. (Technically, he was racing to save his cousin's car, but instead he gives the kid his own frickin' Impala.) And then Letty asks why they haven't talked about having kids yet? *shrug*
Charlize Theron is doing a thing. I'm not sure what she's supposed to be doing. I'm not sure she knows what she's supposed to be doing and I find it somewhat alarming. "See, that's the funny thing about fate--it's cunning. It can bring you beautiful things and it can also bring you moments like this." Uh, okay.
And then Hobbs has his kid's soccer team do a Siva Tau (the Samoan version of haka) before a soccer game and it is GLORIOUS.
Anyway, there's an EMP in terrorist hands and for some reason the US government can't sanction a mission to retrieve it so...it's time to bring in the street racers from Los Angeles? Cool.
Unfortunately, Cipher (AKA Charlize Theron) has suborned Dom and he steals the EMP for himself. Hobbs goes to prison because he refuses to get recruited by Mr Nobody. It is the same prison Deckard Shaw is in. You know where we're going here, right?
PRISON BREAK TIME.
It turns out Mr Nobody and his apprentice Little Nobody (Scott Eastwood) are recruiting the crew, Hobbs, and Shaw to stop Cipher and her new partner, DOM. But surprise, Cipher and Dom attack HQ and steal God's Eye and then Cipher gets extremely petty.
GROSS.
The crew, literally and figuratively stunned, aren't sure what to do, but they know they agreed they wouldn't pull Brian and Mia back in. (*sob*) Also, Cipher has kidnapped Elena and the baby she had with Dom, holy crap. (Elena was pregnant when Letty came back, good lord, she is the most level-headed human in existence.) And then Cipher talks some nonsense about Choice Theory.
The crew follows Cipher's "ghost flight" to New York and I'd be surprised it was their first time there if they weren't all so utterly Californian. (What, you think the kids from Gossip Girl would be on all the time about FAMILY?) And there they discover Mr Nobody's warehouse o' civil forfeiture cars and also a tank.
And then Mama Shaw meets up with Dom. 'Allo Magdalene. (Later on, they pretend that Shaw died offscreen, but clearly his mother absconded with him so that he and brother Owen could be the cavalry later.)
There's a whole scene where Cipher's directing a thousand vehicles hacked for remote control to accompany Dom. Some of the hijacked cars still have people in them. They also drive some cars straight off parking garage upper levels like they're lemmings. It's...original? Anyway, they steal nuclear launch codes from a Russian diplomat. Cool cool cool.
Dom refuses to shoot Letty. So Cipher kills Elena. I AM SO MAD RIGHT NOW. And then she lectures Dom about evolution and "I am the crocodile at the watering hole" and similar bullshit. (Point: Male antagonists do this nonsense all the time and I'd guess that's what they're trying to do with Cipher, but faux-philosophical villainy never makes sense, regardless of gender.)
So everybody's heading to a secret Russian military base where they retrofit nuclear submarines. And for some reason they take their frickin' sports cars with them. Hobbs fends off a torpedo with his bare hands. And I'm not even gonna play, guys: They get chased by a submarine.
So, as previously mentioned, Shaw faked his death with Dom's help so he and his brother could rescue the baby later. Those tricksy Shaws! This also leads to a fun little scene where Deckard kills his way out of the plane while lugging the baby around (he has the baby listen to what sounds very much like Alvin and the Chipmunks).
And once the baby is safe, IT IS ON. Dom takes out the submarine with his car and a torpedo, then the crew saves him from the blast by circling him with the cars.
And then the requisite family barbecue, this time on a rooftop in New York. Whose place is that?
THEY NAMED THE BABY BRIAN.
And then we've got the spin-off.
Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw, 18 June 2021, streamed via Movies Anywhere
Vanessa Kirby plays Hattie, the fourth Shaw, formerly of MI6 because this family is the violent version of the Holmes clan. (There's a running joke about the three kids concocting strategies for bank robbing and it pays off pretty beautifully.)
Idris Elba plays Brixton, or as he says ten seconds into his introduction, "Bad guy." He frames her for stealing a virus--A PROGRAMMABLE DISEASE NAMED SNOWFLAKE--which technically she did, but more for the forces of good?
Brixton asks, "Who's going to stop me?" We know who.
Ryan Reynolds plays Locke, Hobbs's CIA contact, for some reason. Despite Hobbs having retired from DSS in the previous movie, he's apparently now been lent out to the CIA. His kid is very chill about this. (He's supposed to be the best tracker in the world, like we didn't just spend two movies chasing God's Eye.)
Someone out there has clocked how much of this movie is just these two staring at each other and riffing out increasingly ridiculous insults. I didn't have the fortitude but I suspect it might be a lot. Also, they're trying real hard to make us think Hobbs and Hattie are a romantic pairing but they don't actually, like, provide actual evidence. Oh, also, she injected the virus into her bloodstream, because why not.
Our team of physics-defying humans, however, are stymied by Brixton--he's been technologically and genetically enhanced. Because he works for, and I quote, "Eteon. They're a secret tech cult with a mercenary army and plenty of dark money. And delusions of saving the world by augmenting the human race." Why not?
It turns out they need to get the virus out of Hattie in 48 hours or she's dead. (Their other option, of course, is to kill her before the deadline and burn the body quick.) Quest time! They head to Moscow. Eddie Marsan is the scientist who created the virus thing. Kevin Hart shows up as Dinkley, an ambitious air marshall. Eiza Gonzalez is Margarita, a top-level thief, dealer, and fixer. The boys do a HALO jump while Hattie pretends to get captured.
This leads to the delightful "Pick a door" scene. This is not the only time they pull this trick, but it's definitely the most fun.
The boys get captured. Hattie escapes. Brixton reveals that Shaw's original sin (killing his MI6 team) was a frame job and I guess we're supposed to think that Shaw's just been misunderstood.
And then it's time for Samoa. (Represent! Though they had to film in Hawai'i!) And the Hobbs clan! (Apparently their patriarch was a criminal and Hobbs turned him in, which then led to an estrangement.) And going to war with heirloom weapons because Eteon guns are hackable! And another Siva Tau!
The Hobbs clan has gone legit since our protag left home, but they're still pretty cool with building a straight-up kill box on their property. The battle goes surprisingly well, and when Brixton attempts to kidnap Hattie via helicopter, of COURSE they stop him by chaining a bunch of cars to it. Of COURSE Hobbs has to hold the chain together at some point. And in a nice nod to the franchise, of COURSE they pump a car with some homemade NOS.
"Brother, you may believe in machines, but we believe in people. You may have all the technology in the world. We have heart. No machine will ever beat that."
FAMILY.
BUT WAIT. Deckard Shaw killed Han! Why does he get to star in his own movie? Why is he adjacent to our crew now? WHAT THE HELL.
One week, friends.
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