In a certain, ever-expanding corner of the galaxy, May 4 marks Star Wars Day. But here at The A.V. Club, we’re spending this weekend diving into the fourth entries that reset franchises, broke a pop culture curse, or wrapped things up in a gratifying manner. Read on, and May The Fourth Installment Be With You.
The Fast & Furious franchise was simple once. Meatheaded streetracers fell backwards into crimefighting while falling for each other, in an extremely straight and platonic and car-centric way. Whether that was happening in Los Angeles, Miami, or Tokyo, it was contained among a manageable group of himbos who were relatively tied down to Newtonian physics. The third film, The Fast And The Furious: Tokyo Drift, initially filmed as a standalone spin-off with a new cast, showed all the telltale signs of a flagging series. But it also welcomed in the new blood of director Justin Lin, whose subsequent entry, Fast & Furious (which is the name of the fourth film in this syntactically chaotic franchise), would redefine the movies as international blockbusters of globetrotting, family-prioritizing, gravity-flouting proportions. With Fast & Furious, the series transcended corny action cinema to become a billion-dollar soap opera—a team-up franchise wearing tank tops as supersuits.
This is partially due to the long-overdue return of the series’ Superman: Vin Diesel. After skipping 2 Fast 2 Furious because the script was actually too bad and only returning in a cameo for the third film once Universal traded him the rights to Riddick, Diesel triumphantly swaggered back to stardom with the second film in Lin’s ludicrous reign. Reconnecting with Paul Walker’s Brian, Michelle Rodriguez’s Letty, and Jordana Brewster’s Mia, Diesel’s Dominic Toretto has his Avengers reassembled in this soft reboot, and this is the first film where they stop acting like people and start acting like cartoons. The crew stops trying to steal DVD players, but doesn’t sacrifice any of that initial tactility when it starts blowing things up on an international scale for more lofty reasons, like revenge.
From its rip-roaring oil heist opening in the Dominican Republic—where Dom’s muscle car Matrix-dodges an exploding semi tanker—to its elegiac return to L.A.—where Dom reconstructs a crime scene in his mind palace like a sleeve-averse Sherlock—to its brief stint in Panama and its Mexican mineshaft chase, Fast & Furious sees the franchise solidify its love affair with the larger Spanish-speaking world. Bookended comedic cameos from Tego Calderón and Don Omar, who feature prominently on the soundtrack alongside Pitbull and Natasha Ramos, foreshadows a series that would eventually court Latino audiences by casting musicians like Bad Bunny, Ludmilla, and Romeo Santos in bit parts. This choice isn’t an outlier; only two Fast movies have been directed by white people and its ensemble is casually, increasingly diverse. Fast Five would make the brilliant choice to bring back Tyrese Gibson and Ludacris as bickering team staples, but Fast & Furious was the first to flit between countries and languages in a way Mr. Worldwide could be proud of.
It’s also the film that flits between the old-school street-race scenes of the first few movies and laying the groundwork for the bonkers set pieces of what would come. Because this is the first leap towards the truly absurd, Lin still grounds Fast & Furious in the custom-mod, body-shop scene. Brian and Dom still race for their right to be included (undercover) in a criminal enterprise, they still work in garages (separately and together), and they still talk plenty of shit to each other in between low-shot sequences of swaying hips and popped hoods. But rather than caring too much about the cartel’s crimes, or the specifics of the FBI’s investigation, screenwriter Chris Morgan—who came aboard the franchise with Lin for Tokyo Drift, then wrote its strongest run from films four through eight—gives into the musclebound melodrama. His plot off-handedly dispenses with characters who would return under ridiculous circumstances later in the series (like Letty and Han), introduces others who would undergo massive character pivots (like Gisele, who would take one of the first villain-to-hero turns that would become a franchise hallmark), and starts employing more broadly silly plot devices, like secret identities. Dom’s revenge-fueled storyline is neck-and-neck with Brian’s struggle with loyalty and lawlessness. With these as its two guiding headlights, Fast & Furious becomes a film more concerned with massive emotions than massive hauls.
This script also includes the classic exchange between Dom and Gisele, where she asks the hotrod-ogling Dom if he’s “one of those boys who prefers cars to women.” Of course he is, but in the series’ stupid-smart fashion, Dom replies that he’s “one of those boys that appreciates a fine body, regardless of the make.” Does this mean Dom is pansexual? Into cars and humans alike? All of the above? The boneheaded ambiguity is part of the charm, adding fuel to the bromantic stare Dom gives to an injured Brian before sacrificing himself to a maximum sentence in prison…before the ending teases Brian leading a vehicular jailbreak. The big dumb feelings entwine with the big dumb set pieces, where an over-the-top, overpopulated desert sprint (something which would later be perfected in Fury Road) features cars brawling with each other like Twisted Metal and rearing up on their back wheels to attack bad guys. Reality was at least in the passenger’s seat for the first three movies. With Fast & Furious, it’s clinging to the bumper.
Lin’s brash “tune in next time” finale set up the kind of movies the Fast franchise would become after struggling to string a consistent story together. These were to be serialized smashes, films for bros who would follow their convoluted plotlines like their grandmothers watching their stories. The ensemble would get bigger, the stunts would get less tethered to terra firma, and the genre would begin adding so many hyphens (sci-fi-spy-thriller-comedy-action?) that it’d be simpler to just call them “blockbusters.” After Paul Walker’s death, their status as macho weepies gained additional resonance, if only because, starting from the first film and solidified in the fourth, his character’s devotion to his found family was as strong a relationship as any in the series. The only franchise force that might be stronger is that of Lin, whose tenure—helming the films from Tokyo Drift through Fast & Furious 6 and returning for F9—gave a floundering series the clarity of vision it needed to take over the world.
