Editorial: The Fast and the Furious

The Fast & Furious franchise is really a great work of art.  You just don't know it yet.  I really do love these movies!

It started in an era before the franchise was king.  Trilogies were definitely a thing back in 2001, when The Fast and the Furious was released.  But usually you stopped after three.  The only franchises that went beyond that had been around for a really long time, like James Bond, Star Wars, and Star Trek.  Those franchises only had nineteen, four, and nine movies respectively in 2001 (now they have twenty-three, six, and twelve respectively - plus one more on the way for each).  The sick thing is I didn't even have to look any of that up.  Okay!  I'll stop showing off.

I'm not sure when it became okay to just keep making movies.  There were franchises that tried, but ultimately got rebooted (X-Men and Spider-Man).  Maybe Indiana Jones was the first new one to do it.  Maybe Pirates (that fourth one was in development FOREVER).  In any case Fast & Furious was the first franchise to truly break the three film barrier in ten years.  But I feel like Star Wars doesn't even count, and this is my blog, so I'm gonna say thirty-three years instead (since Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home).  And the best part about this franchise doing it?  It was never meant to be a franchise.

Remember when Iron Man came out?  Superhero movies were in a major slouch and nobody expected it to be anything special.  Remember when Taken came out?  Word of mouth made that movie.  How about the first Pirates of the Caribbean?  Nobody knew that was going to be any good.  These are called sleeper hits.  The Fast and the Furious was a sleeper hit.  And it made Vin Diesel and Paul Walker famous.

You might say a sequel is inevitable when a movie does well, but people know that sequels to sleeper hits sometimes don't have the magic of the original (just ask Pirates or Taken).  So Vin Diesel didn't take part in 2 Fast 2 Furious in 2003, but Tyrese Gibson and Ludacris joined in, and it wasn't half bad.  It didn't do as well as the first, but producer Neal Moritz was ready for round three!

Destiny intervened.  Justin Lin was hired.  He would go on to direct the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth installments, turning down the seventh because of a schedule he believed was too . . . FAST AND FURIOUS I had to say it!  I apologize.  But really, he turned down Fast & Furious 7 because he didn't think he could do his best work in such a tight schedule.  Ironically, the film will be coming out almost a full year after the originally planned release date (for very tragic reasons).

So anyway they came out with The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift in 2006 AND it's one of my personal favorites.  They couldn't afford to bring on Paul Walker or Vin Diesel for major roles, but Vin Diesel does have a cameo.  Supposedly he wasn't payed for it, but instead took ownership of the rights to his Riddick character from Universal.  That would make sense.  He had enough clout to pull something like that, and it is a well-documented fact that he loves the character of Riddick.

Anyway, thus far in the franchise the events of one movie hadn't really affected the stories of any other, so 2009's Fast & Furious was a new direction.  It also featured the brilliant tagline:

"New Model.  Original Parts."

It was the first sequel to bring back all four main characters from the first movie.  Get it?  New Model?  Original Parts?  Fast & Furious was pretty good, and it was the first to very clearly set up for a sequel.  Without any spoilers I will say I was surprised the first time I saw this one.

Fast & Furious wasn't a runaway success by any means, but they made enough to keep going.  The franchise was - as some terribly punny critics pointed out - "running out of gas" at this point.

I was genuinely surprised when I found out they were making a fifth one.  Fast Five came out in 2011.  And, I kid you not, it rocked everyone's socks off.  It was the first in the franchise to receive a "fresh" rating from Rotten Tomatoes.  Do you have any idea how rare that is?  For the fifth movie in a franchise to be the critical favorite?  I'll tell you how rare, it's NEVER HAPPENED before or since.  It was kind of a huge surprise to everyone.  It was like a sleeper mega hit.

Marvel's The Avengers claims to be the first movie to bring characters in from their own individual movies and have them team up in the same movie.  In a lot of ways that's true, but Fast Five came out a year before and featured almost every major character from all four previous movies.  It's a great movie.  Seriously.  It's great.

After Fast Five people couldn't wait for the next one.  And even though it didn't get quite as high a rating on Rotten Tomatoes as Fast Five did, Fast & Furious 6 did not disappoint when it hit theaters last year in 2013.  I maintain that it was the most fun you could have had at the movies in 2013.

So why do I love these movies?  What's so special about them?  When they started, franchises were not such a big deal but now franchises are king.  Every Studio wants franchises.  Why do you think DreamWorks released Need for Speed earlier this year?  They wanted their own Fast & Furious type franchise!

The hilarious thing is that all prospective franchises are master-planned from the beginning nowadays, like the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe - the first successful, master-planned franchise).  The Fast & Furious franchise is ANYTHING BUT master-planned!  It's so easy to tell they had no idea what they were doing early on and it's hilarious to me!  If you only knew how jealously all these studios guard their franchises.  And Universal practically has one by accident, it's great.  Just take a look at the titles of these movies.  In order:

The Fast and the Furious

2 Fast 2 Furious

The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift

Fast & Furious

Fast Five

Fast & Furious 6

Does that sound like a master plan to you??  I love it!  And that's not even mentioning the fact that, chronologically, Tokyo Drift comes last - for a very simple reason that I cannot explain without spoilers.

What's more, in an era when so many movies take themselves so seriously (I'm talking to you, Man of Steel), it's so refreshing to have one franchise that is kind of running around like a chicken with its head cut off.  How can you not love that?  We need a franchise like this that will stand up and say, "I don't care what the critics think, I want real people to enjoy this!"  We need movies that can counterbalance the seriousness of Nolan and the Nolanettes (I'm talking to you, Man of Steel).  We need fun movies.  We need Fast & Furious movies.  They lead that charge in a big way.

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For those of you who don't know, Fast & Furious 7 is to be released on April 10th, 2015.  They say Paul Walker's character does not die, he retires.

Interesting side note: I ordered the six-disc blu-ray set of all of them while I was in the middle of this post.  Less than $50 on Amazon!

      Big Shot Critic