Fast Month - The Fast and the Furious

It’s time to go full Throttle: It’s Fast Month

A Franchise that grew from humble beginnings to a multi-million-dollar behemoth, the Fast and Furious certainly managed to hit the right balance to remain profitable, despite reception of the movies themselves not always being great. Throughout the month of June, I’ll be looking at the 8 current instalments of the franchise and giving my brief thoughts on all of them.

Just a heads up (sponsored by Coca Cola, though not really), Paul Walker may be mentioned in these reviews, not always in a positive light, if that makes you uncomfortable, check out my Iron Fist retrospectives or something, he plays a lead character, I can’t exactly shy away from it. (This was sponsored by Coca Cola, though not really - if you don't get the joke, watch the stupid as f*ck safety warning at the beginning)

With that said, let’s start at the beginning with The Fast and the Furious. Made on a modest budget of $37m, it made $207m at the box office. Not bad for a film about street racing, but modest compared to what this franchise would later earn. It had a mixed reception critically, with a 53% rating on Rotten Tomatoes with an average score of 5.4/10 and a 6.7/10 IMDb rating. But here are my thoughts.

The Fast and the Furious is the story of Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker) he’s an undercover cop investigating a series of truck heists with evidence pointing towards street racing gangs. He meets and earns the respect of renowned racer Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and begins a relationship with his sister, Mia. But when it turns out that Dominic is the one responsible for the truck heists, Brian finds himself caught between 2 worlds.

Let’s start with Brian himself, he’s impulsive, doesn’t back down easily, is cocky and you’d think the movie would try to bring him down a peg. He does lose one of his earlier street races but it doesn’t really have a major impact on his ego. He wants to be a detective but is quickly becoming disillusioned thanks to both the FBI and the police being assholes to him. I see why he ultimately sides with Toretto but it is a bit jarring in terms of when it happened. He was literally going to arrest Toretto 5 minutes earlier!

Toretto is given a backstory, it’s tragic but ultimately made the twist that he was behind the hijacking a little predictable. He’s mostly cool and collected but get on his bad side and he can have quite the violent temper. He says he doesn’t really care about people and lives his life ‘a quarter mile at a time’ this will be retconned to sh*t later on.

It’s very much a sausage-fest as neither Mia nor Dominic’s girlfriend Letty get much to do, and the other girls in the movie exist purely to be window dressing. This movie is very much targeted at a male demographic. Nothing here was too offensive, though.

So, about the street racing… yes, there is some of it… there’s a supposed quarter mile drag race dragged out for 2 minutes, implying they were going a colossal 30mph on average. Also, needless CGI employed for literally no reason. There’s some good driving involved in these stunts, I’ll give them that… but the races themselves have so little tension. There’s not a lot at stake in them, even with the Johnny Tran (Rick Yune – also, why that name) as a Vietnamese gang leader serving as a de-facto villain for the piece.

My favourite scene is honestly the second truck heist, where the trucker is armed and there’s actually some tension. Although there are some problems like: why aren’t they wearing camo gear like they were the first time? It’s an example of the dumb fun these movies would become about later on.

Two minor characters are Jesse (Chad Lindberg), he’s there to be a cocky little sh*t and get killed in a way Brian would’ve been earlier, had he not tried to rescue Toretto from the cops. Also, there’s Vince, he’s an asshole, he’s there to be an asshole and also be the only one to notice how bad Brian is at keeping his cover, only to then be rescued by him in the aforementioned heist scene.

This movie is not greatly paced, the small amounts of action are dispersed between a lot of talky scenes. The target audience for this want to see cars go fast, characterisation is at best, a secondary requirement.

This movie does give us some interesting characters and one good race scene, even if it isn’t really a street race. The concept is derivative and the pacing rather slow, also I can’t stand their use of shaky cam during the race scenes, but I still can’t bring myself to hate it.

Rating 60/100