Most of today’s biggest franchises rely on the audience’s familiarity with its source material, like Star Wars or Marvel, but Vin Diesel has managed to make the Fast & Furious series of actioners a kind of superhero franchise with his star power alone. The franchise’s unprecedented rise from a middle-of-the-road Point Break rip-off to one of the biggest powerhouses in the film industry is a curious one.
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It’s not fair to use the so-bad-it’s-good label for Fast & Furious movies, because they have a lot of genuine merits. But, at the same time, they’re not masterpieces by any stretch of the imagination, either.
Great: Every Movie Delivers The Goods
![Vin Diesel and Paul Walker in Fast Five](https://static1.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Vin-Diesel-and-Paul-Walker-in-Fast-Five.jpg)
Fans of the Fast & Furious franchise aren’t interested in seeing artful cinematography, complex themes, and groundbreaking subversions of the form. Like most successful franchises, Fast & Furious movies exist as pure entertainment, providing audiences around the world with a much-needed escape from the crushing mundanity of reality.
And Fast & Furious is one of the franchises that most consistently delivers the goods. While a lot of recent X-Men and Star Wars movies have fallen short on their promises, every Fast & Furious movie comes exactly as advertised.
Flaw: Overuse Of CGI
If the successes of John Wick and Mad Max: Fury Road have proven anything, it’s that cinematic action is much more effective when the stunts are done for real and the cameras are simply there to capture them on film. In Fast & Furious and a lot of other recent big-budget action movies, all the impressive stunts are done using computer-generated effects, and it takes all the weight out of the action.
CGI should be used to clean up the edges of action sequences, not to create them. Fast & Furious movies have done a few big stunts practically, like Furious 7’s car-skydiving sequence, but the franchise has a lot more CG action than practical action.
Great: Self-Aware One-Upmanship
Much like Tom Cruise’s increasingly daring stunts in the Mission: Impossible franchise, there’s a fun self-awareness to the Fast & Furious franchise’s insane sense of one-upmanship. Each Fast sequel has even crazier set pieces than the last, and delightfully ludicrous scenes like Dom and Brian jumping a sports car from one skyscraper into another or the Rock redirecting a missile with his bare hands feel like a wink to the fans.
Thanks to the Fast franchise’s transparent relationship with its target audience, Toretto and his crew going to space has gone from being a running joke in the fanbase to an actual reality (according to Michelle Rodriguez).
Flaw: Razor-Thin Storytelling
While the themes of family are always rampant in Fast & Furious movies, the plot is usually razor-thin. No one comes to these movies for the plot, but the storytelling could at least be coherent.
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Most of the post-Fast Five movies have revolved around a clunky quest to retrieve a MacGuffin that gets marred by an abundance of unnecessary globetrotting subplots along the way.
Great: The Cast
The cast of the Fast & Furious movies is made up of some of the most awesome people in the world: Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Ludacris, Michelle Rodriguez, Tyrese Gibson, Dwayne Johnson, Gal Gadot, Jason Statham, Kurt Russell. It’s hard to choose sides in the various beefs amongst the cast because everybody is great.
Some fine actors have joined the franchise as real-life fans for the sheer fun of it, like Helen Mirren and Charlize Theron, and it’s been a delight to see such high-caliber acting talent letting loose in a zany action movie.
Flaw: All-Over-The-Place Chronology
The chronology of the Fast & Furious movies is all over the place because Tokyo Drift — which is basically a spin-off with little connection to the main saga — really messed up the timeline.
As it stands, the chronological order of the movies goes like this: 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 3, 7, 8. It’s much harder to follow the overarching plot of the F&F movies than in the more clearly defined narrative timelines of the MCU and the Star Wars saga.
Great: High-Octane Action
The gleefully absurd action movies of the ‘80s starring musclebound A-listers shooting and/or kicking their way through a simplistic yet incomprehensible plot — Commando, Road House, First Blood Part II, et al — have mostly been replaced by gritty, grounded action fare like Taken, Bourne, and John Wick. And while those movies are great, action fans would miss the absurdity if it was eradicated from the genre altogether.
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Luckily, Vin Diesel has been keeping ‘80s-style action cinema that throws logic out the car window alive and well with the Fast & Furious franchise. Fast movies are packed with high-octane action sequences that put their nine-figure production budgets to good use.
Flaw: Sidelining Female Characters
Vin Diesel is very vocal on social media about championing strong women, but the female characters in the Fast & Furious movies are often sidelined. Letty was fake-dead for years and Mia is always left holding the baby.
Fortunately, the makers of the franchise seem to have acknowledged this shortcoming and are addressing it with a female-led spin-off being scripted by Nicole Perlman, Lindsey Beer, and Geneva Robertson-Dworet.
Great: It Keeps Evolving
The most exciting thing about the Fast & Furious franchise is that it keeps evolving. It hasn’t been boxed in by a certain formula and has continually moved from genre to genre. The first movie was a pseudo-reboot of Point Break, but the fifth was a heist movie and the eighth was a techno-thriller. The Fast franchise has done a great job of keeping things fresh over the years.
Very few action movie franchises can make as much of an event out of their ninth installment, but F9 is one of the most highly anticipated movies floating in the ether of COVID-delayed releases because each previous sequel has offered something new.
Flaw: It’s Derivative
The first Fast and the Furious movie was a pretty thinly disguised rip-off of Point Break. Instead of the story of an FBI agent going undercover in a gang of surfers, The Fast and the Furious is about an FBI agent going undercover in a gang of street racers.
In both cases, the gang leader and the undercover agent end up developing a bromance so strong that it transcends law and order. Fast & Furious eventually became its own thing, but the groundwork of the franchise is completely derivative.
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