But to miss the series’ resilience, its invention, its adaptability, and the way it has been stripped of its original identity is to miss the story of Hollywood in the 21st century.
One of the new releases on a late June weekend was The Fast & The Furious, a summer car-racing movie starring Paul Walker, who was then probably most familiar to audiences as a menacing rich jerkface in the rich-jerkface thriller The Skulls.
There’s a myth of F&F movies as critic-proof works that film journalists hated and fans flocked to.
Rob Cohen’s high-octane hot-car meller is a true rarity these days, a really good exploitationer, the sort of thing that would rule at drive-ins if they still existed.
It’s slicker than films like Grand Theft Auto, but it has the same kind of pirate spirit–it wants to raid its betters and carry off the loot.
If F&F later became an object of resentment, it wasn’t because critics didn’t understand the appeal of a fun race-car movie.
Thus, 2 Fast 2 Furious brought Brian to Miami, where his new partner was his old friend Roman .
If you’re looking for the moment when F&F discovers the power not only of car racing, but also of absurd things to do with cars besides racing, you might find it there.
What do we mean about blocking out the sun? In 2001, the year the first movie came out, the 10th place movie in domestic box office .
Setting it in Tokyo suggested greater outreach to the international market that was already buoying other action franchises — Mission: Impossible III, which came out the same year, earned more than 66% of its money overseas.
The best thing to come out of Tokyo Drift behind the scenes was director Justin Lin, who would go on to build the series as we now know it.
Dom came back, Brian came back, Mia and Letty came back — and so did Justin Lin.
The creative team slid Tokyo Drift forward in the timeline, making it a kind of flash-forward, so that his death hadn’t happened yet by the time Fast & Furious took place.
It takes a potential weakness, the fact that Tokyo Drift has nothing whatsoever to do with the characters we’re now returning to, and turns it into a strength.
But while Dom’s first crew was pretty white, actors of color have become indispensable to this series, including the charming Nathalie Emmanuel, who joined the team in Furious 7 as Ramsey the computer genius.
The total box office blew up: $360 million for the fourth movie in 2009, $626 million for the fifth in 2011, $789 million for the sixth in 2013, an eye-popping $1.5 billion for the seventh in 2015, and $1.2 billion for the eighth in 2017 — down a little, but still darn respectable.
The sequel naming conventions of this thing have never stabilized: 2 Fast 2 Furious, then The Fast & The Furious: Tokyo Drift, Fast & Furious, Fast Five , Fate of the Furious, and F9: The Fast Saga.
Most obviously Mission: Impossible, which wasn’t putting out as many movies as quickly, but which had both big box office and, often, critical respect and a similar lust for invention when it came to stunts and set pieces.
Maybe the high point for the series in terms of simple pleasure was all the way back when Roger Ebert and Variety saw it as a scruffy exploitation film.
Letty was allegedly dead for a while, too, but that turned out to be the movie-death equivalent of a 24-hour-bug.
Much has been written about the methods they used just to finish Furious 7; Walker’s brothers even stepped in as doubles to allow shots to be completed.
No one would ever have intended it, but the fact that F&F had already made so many swerves, to the point where almost nothing was left that had been in every movie since the beginning, probably made the loss of a lead actor — well, certainly no easier to bear, but perhaps easier to write.
It sent The Rock and Jason Statham off to have a separate adventure, and it’s a lot of fun with a welcome retreat from guns in the final battle.
Not only has the F&F cast turned over; the themes have changed, especially regarding these characters’ positions relative to power.
That not only allows the gang to own cooler stuff; it allows the enemies they’re fighting to be more terrifying and the stakes more absurdly high.
Dom is almost playing out Brian’s arc in reverse: He’s a criminal who reluctantly aligned himself with law enforcement and has become a part of it, made friends with it, learned to work alongside it.
So much has changed now, it’s like the Ship of Theseus.
You can be a little indie movie or you can be a big blockbuster, but if you’re going to be a big blockbuster, you have to be a big blockbuster.
But scaling up, up, up has led these films into escalation for escalation’s sake: If you have an evil system, I have two evil systems. You have a submarine, I have a fleet of submarines.
This series is going to continue, probably to great financial success, for as long as they want to keep making it.
But, as you would with the Ship of Theseus, you have to wonder: Is this the thing we started with anymore? Is there anything to go back to? After all, Diesel says in a behind-the-scenes featurette for Fate of the Furious, it’s a challenge to figure out reasons why these guys would race cars now.
And as stupid as one might think these movies are — as stupid as they may in fact be — they are the story of thriving in the current Hollywood system, and how much ingenuity and flexibility it takes to preserve a series like this for 20 years.