Summary
Roman’s comedic antics have become tiresome and he has become a burden to Dom’s team. His character needs to either dial back his freakouts or sit out future adventures.
Ending Dom’s story believably will be challenging because his rebellious and thrill-seeking nature makes it difficult for him to settle into a quiet domestic life.
Dwayne Johnson’s Luke Hobbs has been instrumental in the franchise’s popularity, injecting fresh blood and a sense of semi-believability to the action scenes. The absence of his charismatic presence in the main series is noticeable.
Fast Five is a very significant movie in the Fast & Furious franchise, but 12 years after its release, it highlights some major issues the series has encountered. Released in 2011, Fast Five follows Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and Brian O’Connor (Paul Walker) as they lead their family of street racers on a heist in Rio de Janeiro. In addition to facing the city’s criminal underworld, Dom and co. must also contend with another enemy in the form of pursuing DSS agent Luke Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson).
Directed by Justin Lin, Fast Five would leapfrog the Fast & Furious franchise to become a genuine action movie titan. However, despite the new life granted to the series by the grear impact of Fast Five, it also brings to light areas where the Fast Saga has taken some wrong turns since. These are just some of the brutal truths that come with revisiting Fast Five.
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10 Roman No Longer Fits In Dom’s Team
As the Fast Saga itself has evolved, so has its ensemble of characters. However, one person who has taken several steps in the wrong direction has been Roman Pearce (Tyrese Gibson). First introduced in 2 Fast 2 Furious with the same no-nonsense attitude as Dom, Roman would become the comic relief of the Fast & Furious series in Fast Five. However, the Fast Saga has since taken Roman’s comedic antics much too far.
Instead of delivering one-liners in the midst of car chases and stunts, Roman regularly goes into an over-the-top panic in the Fast Saga’s increasingly outlandish action scenes, and his screaming in terror in such situations has been as tiresome as it is predictable. It also makes Roman much more of a burden to Dom’s team. Future installments of the Fast Saga need Roman to either dial his freakouts back or sit out future adventures with Dom and co.
9 Ending Dom’s Story Will Be Hard To Do Believably
Dominic Toretto is clearly built for his rebellious lifestyle. Indeed, since Fast Five, the Fast Saga has shown the franchise’s adventures to be a central part of who Dominic Toretto is as a person. That means that a definitive ending for the Fast & Furious series will be that much harder to execute believably due to Dom’s predilection for adventure.
Since Fast & Furious 6, each Fast & Furious movie has opened with Dom settling into some degree of retirement, only for a new mission to call him to action once again. While this is often due to Dom’s devotion to his family, it also shows that Dom is an innate thrill seeker even after becoming a father. Creating a scenario where Dominic Toretto would believably settle into a quiet domestic life for good is going to be as great a challenge for the Fast Saga as finding ways to one-up F9’s space travel.
8 The Rock Is Instrumental To The Franchise’s Popularity
In its first four installments, the Fast Saga was a blip on the action movie radar at best. Fast Five would take the franchise to the new heights, partly by elevating its action far beyond the stakes of street racing, while Dwayne Johnson’s Luke Hobbs would also inject some fresh blood into the Fast Saga. As it turns out, The Rock is one of the most crucial pillars of the Fast & Furious franchise.
Since Furious 7, the Fast Saga has gone more overboard than ever; while The Rock’s Hobbs gave it a sense of semi-believability with his more grounded (by Fast & Furious standards) stunts and fight scenes. With Hobbs absent entirely from F9 and only appearing in an end-credit cameo in Fast X, both films would fly off the rails to a ridiculous degree. With Johnson’s charismatic screen presence also missing from the main series, while being on full display in the spin-off Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw, it has become clear just how much he adds to the Fast Saga.
7 The Theme Of Family Has Been Overplayed
If the Fast & Furious franchise could be boiled down to a single word, it would, of course, be “family”. Right from the beginning of the series in The Fast & the Furious, Dom has built a tight group of fellow street racers and outlaws like himself, with their familial bond being unbreakable. Fast Five would be where the franchise’s family theme would be really solidified with Dom and co.’s heist, but since then, the concept has gradually lost much of its power.
To be sure, Fast & Furious 6 and Furious 7 would use the family concept well. However, much of the cast has come and gone in subsequent Fast & Furious movies, with Dom’s family usually somewhat broken up. Moreover, a quote about family in a Fast & Furious movie has become as predictable as Uncle Ben admonishing Spider-Man about the importance of responsibility, indicating just how over-reliant the Fast Saga has been on the idea.
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6 The Fast Saga Missed Its Perfect Ending (But Still Could’ve Continued After It)
The tragic death of Paul Walker in 2013 would occur in the middle of production on 2015’s Furious 7, and director James Wan would reconfigure the movie to serve as a farewell to both Walker himself and Brian O’Connor. Furious 7’s final scene is perhaps the most emotional of the whole Fast & Furious series, with Dom and Brian going on one last street race and Brian riding off into the sunset. In hindsight, this moment would also have been the perfect time to conclude the Fast Saga.
However, that is not to say that franchise could not have continued in a different fashion, specifically with a slightly reworked approach to Hobbs & Shaw. With Furious 7 having established the pair’s rivalry, Hobbs & Shaw could have easily transitioned the franchise into a new phase with spin-offs taking center stage. In this way, the Fast & Furious franchise could have had its cake and eaten it too with a definitively concluded main series and a new one picking up after it.
5 The Fast Saga Needs To Have Real Stunts
The Fast & Furious franchise would begin with street racing, but Fast Five would bring a dramatic boost of energy to the action sequences of the series. Fast Five would be packed with fight scenes, chases, and car stunts galore, a major factor in the movie becoming such a breakout hit. Fast & Furious 6, Furious 7, and Hobbs & Shaw would follow the same action movie template to great results, but the later films of the franchise have gone a different path.
With the essence of the Fast Saga’s action being all about escalation, each Fast & Furious movie has aggressively strived to outdo its predecessor. However, that also called upon The Fate of the Furious, F9, and Fast X to become far more reliant on CGI and camera trickery than the style of authentic action that would make Fast Five such a hit. With Fast Five’s vault heist among the best action sequences of modern times, it exemplifies the need for high-octane stunts in any Fast & Furious movie.
4 The Fast Saga Only Has Two Great Villains
For as endearing a cast of heroes as the Fast Saga has, the franchise has not been nearly as successful in creating memorable villains. Charlize Theron’s Cipher has become a recurring foe for Dom and his family since The Fate of the Furious, but she has also largely been a manipulator with her henchmen doing most of her dirty work. In all, the Fast Saga has only managed to deliver two villains as memorable as its heroes, namely Idris Elba’s Brixton Lore and Jason Momoa’s Dante Reyes.
With Lore a cybernetically enhanced terrorist and Reyes the vengeful son of Fast Five’s villain Hernan Reyes (Joaquim de Almeida), both combine brains, brawn, and automotive skills to be versatile threats to Dom and his family. Even better, Elba and Momoa fully understand the value of camp in a villain performance, with both chewing every bit of scenery in sight in Hobbs & Shaw and Fast X. In all, Elba and Momoa’s villain performances bring to light one of the few Fast Saga issues that not even Fast Five itself would be immune to.
3 Dom & Co. Work Best As Anti-Heroes
The Fast Saga would begin with Dom and his family stealing DVD players and gradually working their way up to bigger heists. Fast Five would show them at their peak as outlaws on the run from the unstoppable Hobbs. Since Fast Five, Dom and co. have evolved into a kind of government special ops team for off-the-books missions, but this highlights their real effectiveness as anti-heroes.
Dom and his family have committed a laundry list of crimes, with their strong bond forming because they of the risk inherent to their lifestyle. While danger is no less present in the most recent Fast & Furious movies, Dom and co. have also taken on a degree of moral purity that feels completely out of left field for them. Fast Five shows just how much the underground grit Dom and his Fast family began with is essential to who they are.
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2 Dom Has Become Too All-Powerful
Aptly described as the Alpha of the family by Ramsey (Nathalie Emmanuel) in Furious 7, Dom has been leader of his family’s operations since day one. Dom’s reputation as a formidable street racer and a man skilled in a street fight are both well deserved and on full display in Fast Five. Since then, however, Dom has become one step removed from Superman in terms of power and invincibility.
F9 and Fast X would both show Dom as a hero capable of getting out of just about any situation unharmed, the latter culminating with Dom driving his car down the face of a dam to escape an explosion. A big part of why Fast Five would resonate would be in how much Dom’s strengths were counterbalanced by the stakes of the situation and his rivalry with Hobbs. Unfortunately, the superhero-like tone the Fast Saga has taken on highlights the biggest conundrum of all that it has run into.
1 There Are No Longer Any Stakes
Fast Five would start the Fast & Furious series on its new trajectory where the action scenes and stunts are always bigger, bolder, and more incredible. As a byproduct, each movie has also become more and more absurd. F9 and Fast X would push the Fast Saga to a level where physics and logic matter about as much to the franchise as they do in a Road Runner cartoon, with the once charming ridiculousness of the Fast & Furious franchise becoming more and more of a burden to it.
Additionally, the Fast & Furious franchise has also made clear with F9 and Fast X that the death of anyone in Dom’s family can and probably will be reversed, as seen in the casual returns of Han Lue (Sung Kang) and Gisele Yashar (Gal Gadot). All of this has taken any sense of stakes completely out of the equation in the Fast Saga. Meanwhile, Fast Five’s exhilarating heist story is a reminder of just how important believable stakes will always be in an action movie franchise.