In honor of MovieJawn’s Summer 2021 print publication featuring flicks “at the raceway”, Ian Hrabe put together a cinephile’s guide to the Fast & Furious. Purchase our latest print issue here.

by Ian Hrabe, Staff Writer

It’s the first week of 2002 and I have just received a then state-of-the-art DVD player for Christmas. The only DVDs I own are The Matrix, Fight Club, The Patriot and The Fast and the Furious. I am 16 years old, in the nascent days of my punk rock existence, but I still watch The Fast and the Furious regularly.

I work as a popcorn slinger at my local AMC multiplex (circa 2002-2004) and I see 80% of the movies that are released, regardless of quality. Summer of 2003 rolls around and I’m spending the time I’m not working burning through a never-ending stack of DVDs checked out from the public library in an attempt to watch every movie on the IMDB Top 250. I’m watching and falling in love with stuff like The 400 Blows, The Seventh Seal and 12 Angry Men. Though I am holed up in my basement bedroom watching 2-4 movies a day, I frequently emerge from my little pupa to see movies for free at the theater and catch a middle of the week matinee of 2 Fast 2 Furious in a nearly empty theater. The movie is, by any metric, fucking awful. It’s not even “so bad it's good.”

Flash forward to modern day where I get the absolutely inspired idea to subject myself to all the rest of the movies in the Fast & Furious franchise. I don’t know where this idea comes from, but it sticks, and I patiently wait for a quarterly theme for Moviejawn that will accommodate what has quickly become an intrusive thought. To bring things full circle, I check out all of the F&F movies from the library and stack them up next to my DVD player. Where once there were the elegant worlds of the mid-century European Masters like Fellini, Godard, Kurosawa and Varda now sit the modern action-vroom vroom insanity of Cohen, Singleton, Lin, Wan, Gray and Leitch.

The Fast and the Furious

This holds up surprisingly well 20 years later. It’s still dumb, but in a charming way that you can’t say for some of its successors (at least before they weaponized the dumbness for maximum entertainment value circa Fast Five). The nuts and bolts are basic, and if you told me this movie was going to spawn one of the biggest franchises in film history I would have been like, “Wow, you must be able to get a drive-thru lobotomy in your flying car in the future.” Mostly because, despite trying to capture the zeitgeisty cool of street racing, The Fast and the Furious is a boilerplate action-crime caper. Vin Diesel is surprisingly more charismatic than I remembered, and that makes sense considering he is now one of the top grossing movie stars of all time.

3.5 out of 5 Vin Diesels

2 Fast 2 Furious

Vin Diesel is swapped out for Tyrese Gibson’s Roman Pearce and, while Tyrese doesn’t have Vin’s presence, his quipping goofball comic-relief is the only thing that makes this thing remotely watchable. I mean, that and when they ramp a car ONTO A GODDAMN BOAT. I knew how bad this movie was and I willingly walked into it and re-traumatized myself on purpose. The Late 90s charm of The Fast and the Furious is replaced by the Early 00s cringe. The F&F franchise is known for its idiotic one-liners, but without Vin Diesel and Dwayne Johnson to sell them with the requisite panache to make them fun, you get poor Tyrese dropping lines like “Man, it’s a hoasis in here, breh” and “Don’t even think about takin’ the convertible. It might loosen your mousse.” Add a healthy dose of macho sexism and you have a time capsule of just how much toxic shit you used to be able to put in a movie a mere decade and a half ago. We can only go up from here as we venture into the mean streets of Tokyo, right?

1 out of 5 Vin Diesels

The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift

WRONG. While Tokyo Drift isn’t as brutal as 2 Fast 2 Furious, it’s only barely less shitty. I put a week between these two movies to let my brain cells regenerate after so many were killed off by Paul Walker’s Bruh-fest. It isn’t until Han (Sung Kang) shows up that you get a character you can hang onto like a life raft. Otherwise, the film is problematic because it chooses to fetishize Japanese culture rather than thoughtfully explore their particular brand of street racing. As director Justin Lin and screenwriter Chris Morgan’s first collaboration of four, this certainly didn’t give me much faith in the franchise going forward

1.5 out of 5 Vin Diesels

Fast & Furious

After a misbegotten jaunt to Japan, the F&F franchise returns to its Los Angeles roots. The whole crew is back—for better or worse—and the series starts building the foundation of the absolute madness that is to come. Paul Walker is much more palatable after some time away, and you have to wonder if the bleach from the frosted tips was somehow affecting his cognitive function. Fast & Furious still plays it pretty close to the vest, but it feels like a necessary side effect to the hard reset. Every line out of Vin Diesel’s mouth feels like an assault on the part of my brain that craves realistic dialogue. My personal favorite is Dom describing his perfect woman: “It starts with the eyes. She's gotta have those kind of eyes that can look right through the bullshit, to the good in someone. 20% angel, 80% devil. Down to earth. Ain't afraid to get a little engine grease under her fingernails.” Despite a couple of fun chases through some smuggling tunnels between the US/Mexico border, the movie never manages to match the excitement of the opening sequence.

2.5 out of 5 Vin Diesels

Fast Five

Fast Five is where the franchise really starts going off the rails and, in this cinematic universe, that’s a compliment. By becoming unmoored from reality, the F&F franchise found a way to make itself unique. There is actually a mathematical proof that illustrates this fact:

Oceans 11 + Mission Impossible + Cars + Mild Brain Damage = PURE CINEMATIC JOY

What really makes Fast Five sing, though, is the introduction of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as special agent Luke Hobbs. Not only is Hobbs a worthy adversary for the Toretto crew, but he also serves as another vehicle for getting outlandish dialogue across (“Make sure you got your funderwear on''). Yet where Diesel’s delivery of nonsense lines sees its cringe-factor increase as the movies go on, Johnson’s only get better. That’s because the Rock could sell a glass of water to a drowning man. Tokyo Drift made me skeptical of Justin Lin, but in Fast Five he proves that he’s the right man for the job. As dumb as these movies are, you have to admit that it takes a special skillset to pull off this staggering amount of destruction.

4 out of 5 Vin Diesels

Fast & Furious 6

What makes this movie such a blast is that you can clearly see Morgan & Lin sitting down and actively trying to craft a movie that is more wackadoo than the previous installment. They set a high bar, and with Fast & Furious 6 they didn’t just clear it, they lit the goddamn thing on fire with that blue-green flame that shoots out of the tailpipes when you hit the NOS.It's gleeful stupidity, and more action movies should understand that if you're not going to actively be brainy or make a subtextual point, there's no point in even trying. Just let your caveman brain takeover and let the good times roll baby. Watching Fast & Furious 6 I feel like I was able to realize why people love these movies. They’re obscenely fun because they just don’t give a single shit. The end goal is pure entertainment, and there’s a real freedom in this movie that feels incredibly rare

5 out of 5 Vin Diesels

Furious 7

This one feels like the franchise ebbing away from the high watermark set by Fast Five and Fast & Furious 6, but THE ROCK DRIVES AN AMBULANCE OFF OF A BRIDGE INTO A DRONE AND THEN DOUBLE TAPS THE DRONE IN THE FACE. The plotting is tedious, everything out of Vin Diesel's mouth is peak groan-worthy (“I don’t have friends, I got family”). This movie features a car vs car showdown between Dom Toretto and Deckard Shaw where Toretto literally mounts Shaw’s car like an alpha dog asserting his dominance. It’s the kind of vehicular metaphor that’s a little too on the nose for my taste. I couldn’t help but wonder how much this installment would have been improved with Justin Lin back in the director’s chair instead of James Wan. Wan’s style is overactive and it made me realize that it is Lin’s restraint that keeps these movies grounded amid the constant sense of one upmanship these movies have.

3 out of 5 Vin Diesels

The Fate of the Furious

This is, by far, the dumbest entry in the series, but also one of the most entertaining. It's the way they did dirty a character who became inconvenient to the plot. You can see it coming as soon as you realize why Dom has apparently turned heel, and it's the result of some long-term storytelling that probably should have been avoided. And yet, holy hell is this one fun as long as you are willing to go with it. The Hobbs and Shaw stuff in this bad boy is phenomenal and you can see why they spun their alpha male jawing into its own installment of the franchise. What’s so wonderful about these interactions is that it takes the piss out of the unchecked machismo that ran wild in Furious 7 and plays the whole tough guy shtick for a laugh while somehow making both dudes come across like the toughest MFers in the whole damn flick. It’s a curious alchemy.

4 out of 5 Vin Diesels

Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw

We take a break from our regularly scheduled programming for what is, for my money, the F&F franchise’s finest hour. It’s all the insanity you expect from a latter day F&F movie, but here you get to focus on the franchise’s two most entertaining characters—Dwayne Johnson’s Luke Hobbs and Jason Statham’s Deckard Shaw—and watch them bicker for a couple of hours. Add in Idris Elba as a bland-on-paper villain that he rescues with his infinite charisma and the now Academy Award nominated Vanessa Kirby as Shaw’s sister and you’re cooking with NOS. Since there are only 4 characters to focus on—instead of the usual 15-20 in a typical F&F movie—there is plenty of room for backstory and honest character development.

5 out of 5 Dwayne & Jasons

F9: The Fast Saga

F9 features the welcome return of Justin Lin to the director’s chair, yet with the lack of Hobbs, Shaw, and a Chris Morgan screenplay, you can really feel the franchise going into a decline in this one. John Cena is a fun addition to the cast as Dom’s brother who we are—shocker—only just now learning about, but he’s not a suitable replacement for the Most Electrifying Man in Sports Entertainment. This sucker just feels totally empty at its core despite featuring the franchise’s most ludicrous stunt (or should I say LUDACRIS?). Roman and Tej strap a rocket to a Pontiac Fiero and, I shit you not, launch that sumbitch into outer space to destroy a satellite. But there was something joyless about the whole thing since it was basically played as a goofy ass subplot.

2 out of 5 Vin Diesels

To bring this journey full circle, I went to a 9:45 AM showing of F9, fully intending to relive the experience of 2 Fast 2 Furious from nearly 20 years earlier. Who the hell goes to see a big vroom vroom boom boom action movie at 9:45 on a Sunday morning besides suburban dads who have painstakingly bartered for the time by agreeing to give their wife the chance to have her own “me time” the weekend after next? I could see the displeasure on the faces of the young couple cuddled under a blanket in the back of the theater, their morning matinee makeout session and god knows what else thwarted by my lame ass.

As much as I make fun of these movies, I can’t deny that I love them. I think I knew this was going to happen going into this project. I needed to make an excuse for myself to watch these movies I scoffed at for years in my effort to be the most high falutin film snob possible. With kids and work and mowing the lawn and doing the dishes and folding the laundry and taking the dog for a walk and all the other stuff that fills out my day to day, the only way to have a journey of self-discovery is to plan it out via a project that is so big that it requires absolute commitment. With so many cinematic masterpieces out there, one might argue that life is too short to watch TEN movies rooted in underground street racing where people say stuff like “I’m gonna knock your teeth so far down your throat you’re gonna stick a toothbrush right up there to brush ‘em.” But as hokey as Dom Toretto’s “I live life one quarter-mile at a time” motto is, it’s hard to deny how good it feels to slip down a rabbit hole of cinematic excess and just live in that world for a while before getting back on your bullshit.