Revisionist Movie Review : The Fast and the Furious (2001)
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I did not know many things about the Fast & Furious franchise before watching the first film last week, to commemorate its twentieth anniversary. I knew that: 1) it starred Canadian actor Vin Diesel and an inordinate amount of pro wrestlers 2) There is now officially nine movies and they’re all crazier than one another and 3) They were synonymous of vapid, meathead entertainment along with Michael Bay’s Transformers movies until they weren’t.
At some point over the last two decades, Fast & Furious movies graduated from vapid to fun. What exactly happened? Buckle up, I’m going to watch the entire thing to try and find out what the fuck is up with them movies. Today, I’m starting with 2001’s The Fast and the Furious.
To put it simply, The Fast and the Furious tells the story of undercover cop Brian O’Conner (the late Paul Walker), who’s investigating a series of high speed robberies on truck drivers. His mission is to infiltrate the inner circle of a certain Dom Toretto (Vin Diesel), a charismatic figure who runs a garage, runs cars and seems to generally live way above his means. Brian becomes friend with Toretto and start thinking he’s pretty fucking cool, like everyone else does.
Is The Fast & The Furious a dumb movie?
Well.. not more than any other action movie from when the internet wasn’t in the center of everybody’s lives and you couldn’t instantly gauge the plausibility of everything. Despite claiming to be inspired by real life events, it’s actually pretty honest about having a dumb, colorful and implausible premise. It’s a movie where men illegally race cars in a straight line and sort out the winners from the losers by pressing a magic nitro button at the appropriate time.
It is not high art by any means and it doesn’t try to be. It’s a testosterone-fueled fantasy about living on the edge of the system, like there are so many. I believe it was originally dismissed as gearhead entertainment because it is so obsessed with its own technical aspect and that gearheads fucking loved it. They felt Hollywood was treating their hopes and dreams seriously for once and not dismissing them as greasy nerds lurking around a garage.
But it’s not inaccessible to someone who doesn’t know cars. Far from it. If anything, the luxuriant and ecstatic lifestyle of underground car racing might sway young, impressible minds into becoming gearheads. The Fast and the Furious is a movie about sexy outlaws who happens to have a passion for illegal car racing and not the opposite. It’s one of these action movies that inexplicably link the ideas of crime and existential freedom, like a high school philosopher.
Movies with that exact message were a dime a dozen in Hollywood then. So it’s not shockingly vapid or whatever.
Did it accidentally create twenty-first century bro culture?
Maybe accidentally so. This is one comical thing about The Fast and the Furious. Vin Diesel’s character Dom Toretto is a little bro-y, but he’s not egregiously bro: he’s polite, mostly respectful, dates the same for many years and doesn’t appear to cheat on her. Outside of having a Nitro-fueled death wish, he’s pretty normal. To a point where you wonder why soulless, fishnet shirt-wearing adrenaline junkies think he’s any cool at all. He’s a charismatic, but straight older brother.
It’s funny to me because I believe it’s a casting problem. He’s too young and his castmates are too old to be taking order from him. Obviously, screenwriter Gary Scott Thompson was going for the surrogate father archetype, but it doesn’t work at all because The Fast and the Furious does a very, very surface level job at explaining what bind the members of Dom’s crew together. It’s both a blessing and a curse for this movie, which uses it to its advantage.
So wait… you’re saying it’s a good movie?
Kind of? Narratively speaking it’s nothing extraordinary, but it goes through the beats of the undercover cop thriller quite competently. What it does better than others is creating that romantic vision of a microsociety bound by honor, loyalty and all that jazz that makes you hard if you’re between 18 and 22 and it doesn’t deconstruct that vision in any way. At the end of the movie, you kind of understand Dom’s a gangster and you’re not sure how or why.
This is great, because it doesn’t really matter what Dom does. What matters at the end of the movie is that he’s the character with the best values and the most integrity and that integrity is rubbing off on the protagonist. That is the perfect opening chapter to nine movies and two decades of redefining over-the-top cinematographic mayhem. To paraphrase NBA legend Kevin Garnett, it sets up a universe where everything is possible.
There’s no consequences. No casualties. The Fast and the Furious is built 100% with vibes and it works.
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So yeah, weirdly enough I was impressed by The Fast and the Furious’ breakneck bravado. It’s a movie that doesn’t give a shit about being anything else but a movie and it worked so well over the years because they gradually upped the ante when other movies tried to become uglier, grittier and closer to a real life experience. If there’s any equivalent to The Fast and the Furious in any other media, it would be a crazy-ass video game like Just Cause.
It’s just wild, colorful mayhem. No one’s above being entertained by this movie. It was better than advertised.
