Fast Month - Fast and Furious

How do you return your franchise to its roots? Apparently, you take the ‘thes’ out of your title. This is Fast Month

Vin Diesel and David Walker are back, and that’s all anyone will really care about. This movie had a budget of $85m, much like the last one, but was much more popular, making $363m, the next movie would go onto making nearly double that but back to business

Critically, this movie struggled to find its footing, a mere 29% rating on Rotten Tomatoes with an average 4.6/10, it was hardly picking up the slack from the previous movies. But it’s been a while now, how does it hold up?

The tagline for the movie is New Model, Old Parts, clearly a reference to them going back to basics, but once again, there’s only one real street race early on in the film, with mostly action car chase sequences padding the rest of the run-time.

But it’s not the only strange bit, Brian is back to being a cop, now working for the FBI for some reason. And we’ve got the latest asshole to back him up, in the form of Michael Starsiak (Shea Wingham) he does the same shtick of every asshole cop we’ve had in this franchise, so I won’t bother mentioning him any further. Seriously though, didn’t the first and second movies disillusion him about being cop. Also, speaking of FBI idiocy, why don’t they suspect that high-level criminals might have bug-checking technology at their disposal.

OK, let’s talk about the plot. Letty is brought back, only to be killed after the opening heist. She was working undercover to expose a drug lord named Braga, a guy who’s so forgettable I can’t even remember him. And it’s a race between Brian and the FBI and wanted Fugitive Dom to get to Braga first and bring him to justice.

This movie does feel the most like a sequel to the original, it continues various plot-lines set up in that movie but not followed up on since, such as Dom’s reaction to Brian being a cop, and Brian’s decision to let Dom go in the first movie is explored again, as well as what that means about Brian himself.

In the bad news, let’s say the sexism is brought up a notch in this one, I swear there are only so many upward shots of short-shirted girls I can be bothered with. Heterosexual males can go a couple of hours without needing something to masturbate to. Still, we do get the introduction of Gisele Gashar (Gal Gadot) and more of Mia, although her subplot leads to a rather rushed re-kindling of her relationship with Brian.

Then there’s the ending, and because it affects the next movie so, I have to spoil it so, sorry about that. Torretto gets arrested and despite Brian’s efforts, he gets sentenced to 25 years to life. So outraged that a guy who hijacked trucks for several years is getting a high prison sentence, Brian decides to forgo his career prospects, again, and join Dom’s crew in an attempt to bust him out. Minus Han though, they had him leave to Japan (you might think this happened immediately before Tokyo drift but no, he’ll be back) I kinda get it more this time since you spend a lot more time with the 2 of them together but still doesn’t feel quite right.

Fast and Furious doesn’t offer much new content, the villain is incredibly generic but the relationship between Dom and Brian is further explored and helps carry the movie out of being outright bad in my eyes.

Rating 55/100