From a jaw-dropping escalation in stakes to a genre mashup that makes them more than simple
action movies, here are the things that only adults notice about the Fast and Furious films.
Any franchise that lasts is bound to raise the stakes every now and then, but usually,
it follows some sort of logical progression, or at least stays within the same genre. Just
look at the Iron Man movies. The first film is, essentially, about building a suit of
high-tech armor and stopping a bad guy from using his technology for evil purposes. Fast
forward to Avengers: Endgame 11 years later, and Tony Stark is still wearing a suit of
high-tech armor and using it to stop a bad guy from using technology — of a sort — for
evil purposes. Bigger bad guy, weirder technology, and much more universally genocidal evil,
but still basically the same sort of thing.
As it does with so many things, however, Fast and Furious defies that sort of logic. In
the first film, Brian O'Conner goes undercover to take down Dom and his crew because they've
stolen a truckload of electronics. In Furious 7, Dom's crew is recruited to rescue the world's
greatest super hacker from a mercenary warlord who retaliates by launching multiple drone
strikes into the heart of Los Angeles. In the movie after that, they literally stop
a full-on supervillain from holding the world hostage with stolen nuclear missiles. The
spinoff has an actual cyborg super-soldier who refers to himself as "Black Superman."
There are technically still cars involved in some capacity, but that's not exactly a
logical progression from where they started.
"Start out stealing DVD players and ends up heisting 100 million dollars from Rio."
"Not bad, huh?"
The thing is, you've probably noticed that already, and you've probably even joked about
it with your friends. What you really only notice when you look back on the movies, or
sit down to marathon them, is how suddenly it happens. The first three movies in the
franchise are all about street racing. Then Fast & Furious comes along, and all of a sudden
we're dealing with international super crimes. The cars aren't the only things that move
fast in these movies.
Speaking of Iron Man, it's worth noting that the Fast & Furious movies are closer to superhero
movies than traditional action movies. Dom and the Family might not have costumes or
codenames, but Fast & Furious is a superhero franchise in the exact same way that the Avengers
movies are a superhero franchise.
For one thing, there's a point in these movies where the characters just straight up get
super powers, which nobody ever mentions. The best examples are probably in "Furious
7," like the scene when Dom and Shaw get into a high-speed head-on collision and then get
out of their cars completely unharmed so they can have a fistfight. Or when Hobbs is blown
up with a grenade and falls out of a window, crushing a car, and then activates his healing
factor in the third act so he can flex his broken arm so hard that it shatters a cast.
You can find it even earlier, though. In the opening of "Fast Five," Dom snaps a pair of
handcuffs with zero effort.
It's not just the super-strength that makes these superhero movies, though. It's all of
the other conventions that come along with the genre. This is a series in which people
come back from the dead, and where the world is endangered by an unstoppable mastermind
known only as... "Cipher." If you can't imagine Dom's crew taking on Thanos and the Black
Order, then you need to go back and watch the movies again.
You can draw a pretty direct line from Point Break to the first Fast & Furious movie, but
as the franchise went on, it started pulling its influences from very different places.
They've pulled in the imagery and ridiculous feats of superhero movies, the twisty structure
of heist movies, and they've even brought in some soap opera flavor with the reveals
of multiple secret family members. There's one genre mashup, though, that you might not
have noticed until you looked back a few years later. In "Fate of the Furious," they actually
pull a little bit from horror movies.
When Cipher sends Dom to steal the nuclear launch codes from a Russian diplomat, the
entire sequence is built like a horror movie. The most prominent example? Dom himself, who
goes full slasher with his creepy Jason Voorhees mask and a buzzsaw that he might as well have
borrowed from Leatherface.
The most glorious bit of horror style that comes in that sequence, though, happens when
Cipher uses her team's hacker skills to take over a bunch of cars, sending them plunging
out of a parking garage and into an apocalyptic, traffic-blocking heap. In other words, she
creates an unstoppable horde of shambling zombie cars. In a movie that's still largely
built around street racers applying their skills to some increasingly improbable situations,
the idea of everything suddenly becoming The Rolling Dead for five minutes is the best
horror element that they could bring in. Well, until a Furious sequel turns out to be a crossover
with Blade, at least.
When you're a kid watching the action of the Fast & Furious movies, you probably have more
important things to pay attention to than the minor details of a character's backstory.
The explosions, for instance, tend to draw the eye more than, say, a mention that Dom
used to be a professional race car driver before he turned to crime. As a result, there
are a lot of details that might've gone right past you as the film moved on to more important,
more flammable matters. When you do notice them, though, they're more than a little weird.
Case in point: Luke Hobbs, played since "Fast Five" by Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. If you
paid attention when he first showed up, you might've caught that he was part of the Diplomatic
Security Service, which makes perfect sense, right? It sounds suitably governmental, so
it's easy to just go along with the idea and assume that the DSS is something along the
same lines as the FBI or CIA. Well, it is... and it kind of isn't.
In the real world, the DSS is a division of the State Department, and while it is in fact
a law enforcement agency that conducts criminal investigations, that's not really its primary
focus. Rather than tracking down escaped fugitives in foreign countries, the DSS is mostly geared
towards providing security for diplomats. They do deal with counterterrorism on occasion,
but mostly with regards to threats to embassies — the organization was formed after the
1983 bombing of the embassy in Beirut. Considering that Hobbs first appears going after Dom Toretto
for escaping from a low-security prison for mostly non-violent offenders, it doesn't quite
fit with his remit.
As a kid, you probably just assume that movies with multiple sequels are probably following
some sort of plan, and to be fair, as far as F&F goes, that's probably the case now.
After all, the movies had the same screenwriter from the third movie to the eighth, and if
nothing else, he keeps tying up threads from previous movies and introducing new ones for
the next film to tackle. It's all one big saga, right?
Look back on it with a grown-up's jaded eyes once you have a better idea of how the behind-the-scenes
moviemaking works, and it becomes pretty clear that this wasn't always the case. The first
three movies are definitely not connected in the way the later ones are, and more than
anything else, it feels like there was an attempt to reboot that just did not work.
Part of that comes down to star Vin Diesel. While he'd eventually become one of Hollywood's
biggest franchise players thanks to the Fast Saga and Guardians of the Galaxy, there was
a time when Diesel wasn't a big fan of sequels. He even turned down $25,000,000 to appear
in 2 Fast 2 Furious, only returning to the franchise once he became a producer (and after
regaining ownership of the Chronicles of Riddick franchise in return for his cameo in Tokyo
Drift).
Because of all that, the F&F films abandoned the principal cast and instead went to Japan
for The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, which definitely seems like an attempt to
reboot F&F as a brand for street racing movies. Needless to say, it didn't really work out,
and after Tokyo Drift ended up as the lowest-grossing movie in the franchise, F&F was de-booted
back to the original premise, with Diesel, Paul Walker, Jordana Brewster, and Michelle
Rodriguez returning.
"Thank you for bringing Letty home and most of all, thank you for fast cars."
In the main series of Fast & Furious films, the crew has mostly taken on normal human
beings — or at least what passes for "normal human" in a world where someone can catch
a torpedo with his bare hands and then redirect toward someone else. In the spinoff Hobbs
& Shaw, though, they needed to come up with an antagonist that could present a believable
threat to both the Rock and Jason Statham.
The solution was Brixton, played by Idris Elba, a literal cyborg super-soldier whose
computerized brain gave him a tactical advantage that matched his bone-crushing strength. Basically,
Hobbs and Shaw were fighting a Terminator who could deliver snappy one-liners. He even
proves himself to be a match for them on more than one occasion, fighting them to a standstill
in the middle of three square miles of explosions. Eventually, however, they discover his secret:
his advanced techno-brain can only keep track of one opponent at a time. Hobbs and Shaw
wind up beating him with teamwork and the power of friendship.
Thematically, that makes a lot of sense. As you might've picked up from the many, many
times they've said the word, the F&F movies are about family, and coming together to defeat
an otherwise overwhelming threat resonates with that. On a practical level, though, it
might be the dumbest thing the movies have ever done, which is saying something. Why
would anyone ever design a high-tech military cyborg who could only fight one person at
a time? Isn't a super-soldier like Brixton designed to be at least somewhat unique, meaning
that he'd virtually always be outnumbered, taking on groups of regular soldiers who are
traditionally trained to work together as a unit? "Fighting two guys" should be the
first thing they figured out.
We've already covered the superheroic elements, the improbable technology, and the delightful
goofiness of remote-controlled zombie cars, but none of that can prepare you for the end
of Fate of the Furious, where two guys just show up flying around with jetpacks. As a
kid? Awesome. As an adult? Still awesome, but also a little weird when you get right
down to it.
The guys in question are, of course, the Shaw brothers who use their jetpacks to board Cipher's
untraceable ghost plane and rescue Dom's secret baby in the culmination of every bit of Fast
& Furious weirdness for at least three movies. The thing is, unlike the other over-the-top
plot devices, the jetpacks are never once explained, or even mentioned. The God's Eye
gets a long sequence devoted to it, Brixton's cybernetic enhancements have a detailed origin
and consequences, but the jetpacks? Those are just there, treated as though they need
about as much explanation as, say, a Honda Civic.
The thing is, these particular jetpacks bear a striking, and presumably also not coincidental,
resemblance to the Falcon's wingsuit from the Captain America movies. Even in a world
with gamma-powered rage monsters and literal thunder gods walking the Earth, they're considered
unique enough to make their user qualify for superhero status. Owen and Deckard Shaw show
up with two, and don't even bother to talk about them. They might as well just turn to
the camera and say "You saw Avengers, right? It's like that."
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