[The Fast and the Furious franchise was the first one I visited on this blog. In anxious anticipation for Fast Five, those posts reappear now only slightly reedited, and now also with links and pics.]
Just as every film franchise must start somewhere, so must this enterprise. Rather nicely, the random number generator that shall be determining a large portion of my near future has decided, for the maiden voyage, a franchise of recent vintage, popular, but not too popular, liked by many but beloved by not many. This is The Fast and the Furious, and the franchise it begat.
Thinking back to the distant, mist-shrouded summer of 2001, we find a season filled with bloat and sequels, a rarity in Hollywood to be sure. Consider what filmgoers had to look forward to: Jurassic Park III, The Mummy Returns, Rush Hour 2, Planet of the Apes (remake), Scary Movie 2, American Pie 2, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, and whatever turd Michael Bay was aborting (Pearl Harbor). Shrek was also there. And hoo boy, I’m gonna have to watch a lot of these – franchises and all.
Amidst all this CGI dick measuring, is it any wonder that no one expected anything of a B-movie of moderate budget and moderate ambition? On its own opening weekend, pundits expected Doctor Dolittle 2 to best it (“it” being The Fast and the Furious). Why? It had more star power...Eddie Murphy, people! And so, amidst all this, is it any wonder that at B-move of moderate budget and moderate ambition did so much better than anyone predicted?
And make no mistake, what we have here is undoubtedly a B-movie. It even shares its title, and its love of cars, with the great Roger Corman’s inaugural AIP picture. That 1955 movie was called The Fast and the Furious too, by the way. This particular Fast and the Furious is helmed by director Rob Cohen, a filmmaker of appropriately modest ambition whose most notable previously was Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story. The inspiration for The Fast and the Furious, 2001 model, came from an article about illegal street racing in “Vibe” magazine. “Racer X” it was called. So armed with this article, and brief research into actual New York street races, Cohen and his cadre of screenwriters sought to create a narrative.
The storyline is essentially Point Break with cars. This is not a new observation; the movie’s Netflix envelope says so much. So, summarizing both movies at once...A series of daring robberies are somehow connected to a Los Angeles extreme sport subculture. A rookie FBI agent infiltrates a sports gang led by an intriguing, cocksure figurehead who proves to be a mentor figure to said rookie. The Feds lead a raid against another dangerous gang, only to acquit them. The rookie suspects his own gang, and grows conflicted about his allegiance to the Feds or his mentor. Ultimately the rookie aids his gang in a robbery gone sour, leading to a final conflict once his mentor realizes he is a mole. They face off at the site of the mentor’s cherished dreams, where the rookie ultimately aligns with the gang and abandons his policing career. Also, there is a tedious romantic subplot in there someplace. Simply replace surfing with street racing.
To get the audience’s attention, The Fast and the Furious starts with a robbery. In this case, four vehicles (1995 Honda Civics, bolded for in this film the cars are the main characters) speed alongside a big rig truck. Through involved means that abandon logic in favor of pure action spectacle, one disguised robber boards the speeding truck and takes the wheel. Add in another unmotivated stunt, and it’s a wrap.
Here, a couple of minutes in, it is obvious why this movie succeeds: Real action. Real driving, real stunts, not a single obvious use of CGI. For a film that echoes old drive-in pictures in tone and heart, this is...this is honest.
Moving on to Dodger Stadium. Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker) test drives his green Mitsubishi Eclipse GS-T, unable to break 140 mph. We don’t know it yet, barring basic intelligence, but Brian is our Keanu Reeves figure, our mole into the realm of street racing. He is also the most white-bred character in the movie.
Now, about Paul Walker. He is one of two top-billed actors, and everyone (the producers, etc.) all expected him to break out as the star. This was to be Walker’s gala day. In the future, we know better, and still don’t have flying cars. Playing the Keanu Reeves role, Walker is out-Keanu Reevesed by Keanu Reeves. His co-star, the gang leader, is far more important. My friends, meet Vin Diesel, the movie’s true non-vehicular star. For if anything other than cars and stunts lead to the film’s success, surely it was Diesel. Given an underwritten role (they all are), this New York bouncer-turned-actor commands a fair deal of presence and mystery. His name, so stupidly apropos for automotive movies, was his bouncer nom-de-plume chosen to protect his true, Clark Kent identity – Mark Sinclair Vincent. Here, Diesel plays the role of Dominic Toretto – we’ll call him Dom. It’s shorter, and it reminds me of champagne. Basically, Vin Diesel owns this movie like no one else.
So Brian (our Keaneaux, remember) has ingratiated himself with Dom by his consistent eating of tuna (not an entendre). With greater efficiency than my own writing, we’ve met Dom’s entire gang – his sister Mia (Jordana Brewster), his girlfriend Letty (Michelle Rodriguez), the angry, angry Vince (Matt Schulze), and a few others who don’t really matter. And now it’s off to the film’s real centerpiece, and the audience’s real reason for being here – the illegal street race. Ten minutes in. Nice and quick.
We’ll focus on this bit, then struggle to speed through the rest of the film. The film’s insistent language of rapid cutting and loud rap/rock/techno/whatever (soundtrack composed by the enigmatic “BT”) introduces about a mile’s worth of great neon cars. This is a truly multi-ethnic gathering, and not just because of Diesel. Indeed, Brian is the whitest man here. The film is altogether rather insistent about youth culture stuff, and it’s a bit of an exaggeration. Brian barters his way into a street race by staking his green Mitsubishi Eclipse GS-T. Also, rapper Ja Rule is there. Why? Almost surely a marketing ploy, as this is his one scene. Oh, and he is on the soundtrack (surely collaborating with the enigmatic “BT”)
With all due efficiency the race is off! This is like a 21st century variation on the “Chickie Run” from Rebel Without a Cause, but you already knew that. A few notes: Brian employs nitrous-oxide boosters to gain speed. (This movie calls it NOS, which I was convinced was another rapper until Google revealed otherwise.) As the speeds increase, this movie does something unfortunate. It uses CGI. Speed is communicated by weird visual background effects, and an extreme use of the Vertigo zoom. Ultimately Dom pulls ahead, in an intended “money shot” where the camera follows past his arm to the shift into the car’s engine and out through the rear exhaust. Yikes. Dom wins.
But here come the po-lice! All scramble, in a nicely choreographed bit between cop cars and Rice Rockets Dom ditches his red car (I didn’t bother to mind its make), and finds himself pursued on foot. Then Brian makes good headway by rescuing Dom, in a quick and fun little car chase.
Having evaded po-po, the audience is threatened with some “getting-to-know-you” dialogue. This is cut mercifully short when, all of a sudden, gun-wielding Asians on “crotch rocket” motorcycles instead corral our heroes to Chinatown. Here we meet Johnny Tran, played by future Bond henchman Ricky Yune. Generic, needless threats are issued, and Tran destroys Brian’s green Mitsubishi Eclipse GS-T...So, Tran. Tran is a rather essential character for this film’s plot machinations, since he is the closest thing we get to a true villain. Even though (spoiler alert) he is not behind the truck hijackings, and is here almost entirely as a red herring. Oh, and then there’s an explosion.
So far, so good. One act over, and it’s been almost nothing but action and forward momentum, with the excitement of the racing stunts as well as the audience’s discovery of a fully-rendered car subculture. Hope you liked that, because from here on out, it’s mostly character development. And in this film, built on archetypes and ciphers, that is not a good thing. Brian and Dom return to Dom’s lair in Echo Park, and I must say that I like the attention to neglected Los Angeles neighborhoods. Echo Park, Silver Lake, Angelino Heights, this movie has a true love of its setting. Anyway, character relationships develop...Uh...Rivalries form...Brian starts a stultifying romance with Dom’s sister Mia...Uh...
Oh! And we learn for certain that Brian is a cop. This quickly leads to scenes of him sneaking around rival gangs’ warehouses. The conflict is over electronics goods being stolen from the trucks. Yeah, DVD players and such. It’s kinda hard to get all worked up over this as a MacGuffin. Kinda chump monetary change for an action film, really. Ultimately, Brian discovers a grand cache of goods in Tran’s warehouse. He also discovers Tran in the process of acting randomly villainous towards...some guy. Again with the red herrings. But we need some reason to dislike Tran. This all leads to a pointless police raid of Tran’s various assets (all done in a big-deal montage), revealing the red herring. The countless electronics goods were purchased legally...Okay then. Random.
It turns out, of course, that Dom is the criminal mastermind. He performs another truck hijacking as we are instead forced to “enjoy” Brian and Mia’s budding romance. So in a sense Dom is the villain. In the film’s best bit of dramatic cleverness, audience sympathy is juggled between Brian and Dom. This all works entirely due to Diesel’s performance. It’s also to the movie’s detriment, as the main dramatic momentum is no longer about stopping a bad guy, but about guessing the outcome of a budding bromance. Yeah. And besides, it never becomes clear why Dom is robbing these trucks. We never see the goods he’s stolen, nor get any sense that he is using the money on anything, other than maybe souping up more cars. Dom’s basic lifestyle, with backyard cookouts in his crumbly Echo Park lair – that’s not too high-end. Maybe he’s doing it for the “thrill,” but therein come “character motivations,” and I’m not too comfortable considering those.
Okay...We seem to have stalled here. And it’s been a while since some good car action. So it’s off to Palmdale, in the desert, for a completely legal event called Race Wars, where cars drag race each other over a quarter mile track. Here is Letty’s only real scene, where she races some randomly introduced horndog for no real stakes for no real reason. It’s pretty clear they cast Michelle Rodriguez first, then shoehorned in a part for her. Of more importance is a race involving Jesse, Dom’s mechanic, against Tran himself. This is also introduced randomly. The predictably telegraphed end result is that Jesse loses, thus owing his car to Tran, that sneaky Oriental. Jesse flees.
Night eventually falls over second unit rave footage, as Brian watches a “dramatic” scene between Dom and Mia. Realizing that the Third Act is coming up, Brian reveals to Mia that he is a cop and he suddenly has to save Dom, since now, all of a sudden, the truckers are ready for him. That sort of came out of left field.
So now Dom and crew (sans Mia and Brian) are readying another truck hijacking, this time in broad daylight and without their disguises. Why? Because now that the audience knows who the hijackers are, we need to see them in order to feel their plight. What follows is a rather lengthy botched hijacking, where Vince (the angry guy, remember?) gets stranded on the speeding truck’s hood. The impracticality of Dom’s mid-transit hijacking method becomes undeniably obvious now, as we are asked to think about it for longer than 30 seconds. So in not-particularly short order all of Dom’s crew falls back, unable to pry Vince from the truck. Finally it is up to Brian, now in his new souped-up 1995 Toyota Supra (a plot thread I couldn’t be bothered to recap). Brian rescues Vince, revealing to all in a pivotal moment that he is a cop.
So wherever this plot is going, it has gotten there. Brian confronts Dom at his lair’s front lawn. Fortunately the writers have set up an outside conflict, since Tran arrives on his bike (motorcycle, that is) to pull a very L.A. drive-by. Jesse is hit – I don’t know if he’s killed or merely injured, and there is never any follow up on this. Whatever, this means that Brian and Dom can now join forces to bring down the evil, yellow Tran. Brian is in his souped-up 1995 Toyota Supra, and Dom is in his prized 1970 Dodge Charger that we’d learned is the lynchpin to his Dark, Disturbing Past. A past I have not concerned myself with. It doesn’t matter, for what we have here is another nifty car chase through the hilly barrios of L.A. Brian murders Tran, in the film’s only verifiable death. The main character, our hero, kills a guy who was really just an observer. But we need this, because, uh, Tran is the bad guy, kind of…
Speaking of quasi-villains, here comes Dom. His totally heterosexual relationship with Brian comes to a non-sexual head here as they both overlook the lethal Australian waves Dom has long yearned to surf – I mean, the quarter mile drag race from his childhood. To demonstrate Brian’s character arc, here he races Dom. They each narrowly miss a speeding train, in the film’s central stunt. Sadly, since this is the climax, director Cohen feels the need to the CGI and stylistic quirks he has largely eschewed since the initial street racing scene. Odd slow motion transpires, and again we speed into Dom’s primitive CGI engine. Man, CGI from 2001 does not look good on television.
So the race ends, seemingly a tie, when a big rig sideswipes Dom’s prized 1970 Dodge Charger. Think of it as ham-fisted symbolism, if you will. With the cops closing in, Brian hands Dom the keys to his souped-up 1995 Toyota Supra, permanently siding with Dom and his world.
The end. Well, almost. In a post-credits Easter Egg, Dom drives a 1970 Chevrolet Chevelle SS through Baja California, a voice over declaring the film’s thesis statement:
"I live my life a quarter mile at a time, nothing else matters. For those ten seconds or less.... I'm free."
So this hasn’t been a review, but rather a free-form recap. I’m kind of breaking myself in, and I’m sure I could make a car metaphor here if I really felt like it. So what do I personally think about this movie? It is a thoroughly competent actioner, nothing more, and if you’re in the mood for that, it’s completely adequate. Especially if you like the subject matter.
So far I have been struggling to avoid saying anything about the sequels. Clearly the filmmakers weren’t really considering sequels yet, though they’ve done nothing to prevent them. Of course, for a movie as modestly conceived as this one, franchising is a happy accident, a result of the film’s popularity and profitability. Consider it. For $40 million, the film quintupled that investment in the U.S. alone. And it’s an action movie, a genre that, like horror, is really easy to sequelize, built upon repeatable stories and thrills. And throughout, I truly get a sense that the filmmakers have a genuine love for their cars.
RELATED POSTS
• No. 2 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003)
• No. 3 The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006)
• No. 4 Fast & Furious (2009)
• No. 5 Fast Five (2011)
No comments:
Post a Comment