Furious 7, the most recent entry in the Fast and Furious series, was released on April 3rd. At the time of this writing, it has already earned more than $800 million worldwide. While this number will likely be eclipsed in the summer by such heavyweights as Batman v Superman and The Avengers: Age of Ultron, $800 million is no small amount. In fact, if we’re considering international gross rather than domestic alone, Furious 7 has made more money in two weekends than nearly any film in all of 2014, including Guardians of the Galaxy, American Sniper, Mockingjay, Captain America, and The Lego Movie. The only two films I can find in 2014 that Furious 7 has not eclipsed globally are the final Hobbit movie and Transformers 4, and neither reached $800 million after only two weeks. The Fast and Furious franchise can now consider itself one of the most lucrative in the world.
So how, exactly, did this happen? How did a $38 million car racing flick featuring a bunch of barely-known actors turn into a global phenomenon? I may have some insight into that. My fiancee Reba and I had not been following this series. Aside from each having seen one full film in the franchise and a handful of scenes, we decided that we were woefully under-prepared for the juggernaut that is Furious 7. So, to get ready (and prepare for the complete Marvel marathon on April 20th-21st here), we decided to catch ourselves up on every single film in the series over a single weekend.
What follows is my account, as a Fast-and-Furious-newbie, of the merits (or lack thereof) of each individual installment, as well as a tracking of the series’ evolution from mid-budget racing series to Michael-Bay-grandiose action franchise. You’re welcome.
The Fast and the Furious: It seems almost cruel to judge the original The Fast and the Furious on the merits one would usually apply to a film. The story, which is essentially just Point Break but with racing instead of surfing and truck heists instead of bank jobs, is serviceable-at-best. The actors are all green and often terrible. The dialogue is abysmal, and even the race scenes apply all sorts of cheesy effects and distortions that distract from the solid stunt work.
However, all the cheesiness and ineptitude ends up lending the film a sort of dopey charm. What it lacks in complexity and originality, The Fast and the Furious makes up for in the earnestness of its themes. In fact, earnestness is the film’s greatest strength: it always feels like everybody involved is trying their hardest to deliver a cool movie, never winking to the audience or mocking the inherent silliness of its genre and premise. Even the way that LA is shot, with warm colors and matter-of-fact cinematography in actual East LA neighborhoods, evokes a certain type of honesty that’s missing from a lot of LA-based films, even later Fast and Furious movies.
All in all, despite its obvious shortcomings, the original The Fast and the Furious won me over. Still, if you were to show me this film in 2001 and ask me whether it would spark a worldwide phenomenon, I would have scoffed. The film bears little resemblance to the later entries of the series, yet is still instrumental to enjoying everything those movies have to offer.
2 Fast 2 Furious: The biggest problem with 2 Fast 2 Furious is that it lacks the earnestness and amateur spirit of the first film. With only Paul Walker returning to the franchise, 2 Fast 2 Furious was clearly greenlit as a cash grab, and it feels that way. Instead of stealing its story from Point Break, 2 Fast instead cribs from Miami Vice: the film literally moves to Miami, Walker teams with his black high-school buddy, and they go undercover to expose a drug exporter.
The budget is higher this time ($76 million, according to Box Office Mojo), and the extra polish that budget affords is ultimately detrimental to the film. Unlike the first film, it feels like 2 Fast 2 Furious should be capable of more than it’s giving. Beyond that, if you’re trying to track the evolution of the series or catch up on the story for the later entries, this movie is entirely skipable. The only significant characters that are introduced, Roman and Tej, are barely explained as characters and re-introduced in Fast Five anyway. And if you’re looking for the stylistic evolution of the series, 2 Fast is an outlier. It is a more colorful movie than most (especially entries 4-7), but director John Singleton never returned. This one is for completionists only.
The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift: Tokyo Drift is what I call the “Halloween 3” of the franchise. Like the Halloween series, the Fast and Furious producers decided with their third entry that audiences were not drawn to the series for its characters or any ongoing plot, but instead to a simple concept. Halloween tried to become an anthology series set around the holiday of Halloween, and Fast and Furious tried to become an anthology series of different characters racing fast cars in different cultures.
Neither idea lasted past a single entry.
Despite being the Halloween 3 of the franchise, the actual story in Tokyo Drift is derived from The Karate Kid. The lead, Sean, is a troubled youth who gets in trouble racing people in every town he moves to. Finally, his mom sends him to Japan with his father, where he immediately gets involved in the local race scene, again. Here, a character named Han decides that he likes the kid for unexplained reasons and starts giving him fast cars and teaching him how to drift.
For the most part, Tokyo Drift is skipable and one of the weaker entries in the series. However, it is notable for a couple of reasons. First off, this is the first entry in the series to be directed by Justin Lin, who would ultimately define the look and feel of the series by directing the next three entries.
Second, because the writers decided that they would like to include the character of Han (who dies in this film) in other Fast and Furious movies, the chronology of this entry gets complicated. Until Fast and Furious 6, there is no indication of when three takes place. It ultimately occurs simultaneously with Furious 7.
Fast and Furious: If you go by Rotten Tomatoes, then this is the “worst” movie in the series, at 28% positive reviews. I get the impression that a lot of the negativity was centered around this seeming like last gasp for relevance. After eight years, the producers were reassembling the cast of a movie that was already being forgotten by time. Reviews often cite how “unnecessary” this movie was as a sequel, and there are cries to put the series, which had never achieved greatness (or arguably any level of merit), out of its misery.
However, now that the Fast and Furious series has been revamped, critically-acclaimed, and enormously successful, the context of viewing Fast and Furious changed. It may not be the best entry in the series, but I would argue that it is the most important. This is the sequel that the series writers and producers should have made in the first place. It’s an actual continuation of the story rather than a meaningless diversion like the other sequels. It is also the most transitionary entry in the series: in addition to re-centering the story on the cast of the original film, it redefines the “look” of the franchise in a way that its sequels would follow, and gives the characters personal stakes in the narrative again with Michelle Rodriguez’s death. The action sequences are still firmly planted in race and chase sequences, like its predecessors, but the template for the bigger, badder sequels is in place.
The amount of time between the first and fourth film helps it stand out, as well. The theme is still a silly and poorly defined take on “family,” but the return of these characters into each other’s lives feels slightly more meaningful because of the passage of time. Paul Walker, in particular, is practically a different person. He’s evolved from the skinny bleached-hair surfer-dude persona of the first two films into a real adult, and no longer looks ridiculous working alongside Vin Diesel (his acting has improved significantly, as well).
Fast and Furious also manages to bring Paul Walker, Vin Diesel, and Jordana Brewster back onto the same “team,” which leads nicely into…
Fast Five: Fast Five literally starts at the very moment Fast and Furious leaves off. Walker and Brewster break Diesel out of his prison bus by indiscriminately wrecking it (although a news report assures us nobody died). This leads into an excellent action sequence, while the team works with first-film-veteran Vince to rob a train transporting fancy cars.
This sequence is a real tour-de-force, and shows that Justin Lin’s ability to direct action extends far beyond race sequences. During the scene, there are hand-to-hand-fights, gunfights, car chases, massive collisions, and a huge stunt-jump off of a bridge. It all comes together beautifully and never feels hard to follow.
From this point on, the film falls back on its history of borrowing from other films and focuses its narrative structure around Ocean’s 11. It’s an inspired choice that allows several characters from previous movies to re-enter the franchise while utilizing a fun roadmap for the film to follow. We get to see this team of “specialists” (in quotes because I’m not sure a “fast-talker” really qualifies as a heist specialist) work together and figure out how to beat one of the most complex security systems around. The team is fun, the villain is unlikable, The Rock gets to chew some scenery, and the goal is crystal clear. It’s all simple, but sometimes simplicity is the best route in action movies. If your goal is to put together a series of great action scenes (and several scenes, including the Rock/Vin Diesel wall-smashing throwdown and the vault-hauling destructive finale, qualify), then the last thing you want to do is drag it down in exposition.
For this reason, Fast Five remains the best film in the series.
Fast and Furious 6: The sixth entry in the series reaches heretofore unrealized levels of stupidity with its plot: Michelle Rodriguez isn’t dead after all! As it turns out, the villain in Fast and Furious didn’t shoot her in the face, he shot a gas tank, which exploded and blew her away from the car! Then, when they went to the hospital to kill her and finish the job, they realized she had amnesia, and the bad guy’s buddy recruited her for his own evil car-heist-team (this is apparently a common thing in the Fast and Furious world). Then this bad guy just so happened to be the man that The Rock needs to take out now, and the Fast Five team (minus the Dominicans, I guess) is his only hope to get them!
It’s hilariously contrived, and F&F6 may have one too many plot elements stuffed into it, but it further evolves the series into the Michael-Bay-esque parade of bombast that it wants to be. The action scenes are utterly crazy, including a massive finale on a departing airplane and another sequence where a tank chases the team down a highway whilst smashing unknowable numbers of civilian vehicles. The tank sequence ends with Vin Diesel and Michelle Rodriguez BOTH being flung from their cars, with Diesel grabbing Rodriguez in mid-air and landing safely. Fast and Furious 6 exists firmly outside of our own reality, in a world where federal officers hire teams of car heists to fight other car heist teams in exchange for amnesty and a house in East LA. It is fucking insane.
But unlike, say, the Transformers movies, there is a level of humanity, however cliched, in these characters that prevent it from being a cynical cash-grab. The cast and crew seem wholly invested in the series and try their damdest to sell their affection to the audience. The end scene at the house from the original movie, which could have easily been the end of the series, really cements the feeling that this cast has become a family of their own. A family centered around explosions and flying headbutts, but a family, no less.
Furious 7: And here we are: Furious 7. Before delving into it, let’s discuss the shadow hanging over the production: Paul Walker’s death. This was obviously a tragic thing that affected everybody involved with the series, but it does not ultimately impact the film much at all. Aside from a montage, tribute, and a tacked-on race sequence (with some well-done but awkward CGI work straight from the uncanny valley), I never felt like Furious 7 was working around Walker’s partial absence, or that scenes with him in them felt artificial. If they did have to CGI him into the majority of the film, it was impossible for me to tell on my first watch. I did notice that the movie centered more around Vin Diesel than previous entries, which may have stemmed from some post-mortem rewrites, but it’s never distracting or uncomfortable.
As for the “tribute,” it’s a nice, well-meaning way to say goodbye to him, and the creative team does the smart thing by not killing his character, or even fully writing him out of the series. Given the circumstances of Walker’s death, having him perish in a car-related sequence would have been difficult to swallow. Coupled with the “See You Again” song used for the final race/montage, Furious 7 ends with the idea that Walker is still out there, alive and well, in their own universe. He’ll always be “family,” just like Diesel’s character has been saying for 14 years. It’s a nice sentiment to end on, and actually adds heft to what was a tacked-on theme in the first film.
So, what about the rest of the movie? Well, take my Fast and Furious 6 review and turn everything up to 11. The plot is even more convoluted this time: the last movie’s bad guy had an assassin brother played by Jason Statham who has decided to hunt down the people responsible for his brother’s injuries. The intro scene shows that he is capable of murdering an entire hospital and destroying most of the building single-handedly. He also seemingly has the ability to teleport to wherever he needs to be to fight the gang, regardless of country. He pursues them in LA, Tokyo (where Han’s death in Tokyo Drift is retconned into being at Statham’s hand), the Caucasus Mountains, Abu Dhabi, anywhere they happen to be.
In addition to the unrelenting assassin, Kurt Russell recruits them to rescue a hacker and steal back a piece of security tech called the “God’s Eye” in exchange for support in tracking down Statham. It’s very video-game-esque storytelling: they have to defeat a certain bad guy, but first they need to complete one separate goal, which leads to another goal, which leads them back to the first goal. It’s lacking in elegance, but the purpose is clearly to string together a series of insane action sequences.
Once again, this really is Fast and Furious 6 turned up to 11. In one scene, Paul Walker jumps toward a cliff edge to grab on in midair, comes up short, but a car drifts over so that he can catch the spoiler. This is after they have already dropped into their mission territory by skydiving in their cars, but before visiting Abu Dhabi and jumping a car from one skyscraper to the next…twice. Finally, The Rock, after literally flexing so hard his arm cast breaks open, shows up at the final fight and fires hundreds of bullets at things from a mini-gun. At the same time, Vin Diesel fights Jason Statham in a collapsing parking garage, then launches himself at a helicopter in a car, and somehow manages to strap a bag full of explosives to the helicopter to destroy it. This somehow triggers Michelle Rodriguez’s memory return.
Furious 7 is enormously, bombastically, gleefully stupid, but it’s also a lot of fun. While other action series’ like Transformers get bogged down in cynicism and unlikable characters, the Fast and Furious series seems to know exactly what it wants to be, and I’ll be damned if it isn’t exactly that.
In Conclusion: I’m not going to argue that these films are essential viewing for anybody. I did, however, have a good time watching a series evolve into something completely different within less than 24 hours. Watching them in such a short timespan actually adds to their appeal, as the consistency of their themes and the materializing of the central “family” becomes more apparent. In fact, certain plot-holes, such as Han’s inexplicable ability to keeping buying new cars for Sean in Tokyo Drift, actually make more sense when viewed in the “correct” order, after other films that were made years later.
You probably already know if this kind of movie is for you or not, and I’m sure plenty of people still roll their eyes at this series. That’s fine. But there’s a sense of purpose to these latter films that’s missing from many modern action films. The Fast and Furious movies know exactly what they want to be, and deliver just that. Filmgoers worldwide have just given them $800 million to make sure they keep on delivering.