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Like a 1969 Yenko Camaro soaring off a Florida quay on to the luxury yacht of an Argentinian drug baron, the Fast & Furious franchise can be seen as one prolonged exercise in defying gravity.
Where rivals such as James Bond or Mission: Impossible pretend they’re addressing deadly serious geopolitical conflicts, Fast & Furious has Dwayne Johnson redirecting a torpedo with his bare hands.
Even the first film, 2001’s The Fast and the Furious, was assembled from parts: the title borrowed from an old Roger Corman B-movie; the subject matter gleaned from a 1998 Vibe magazine article; the plot borrowed from Point Break, and applied to a gang who use high-performance cars to steal … DVD players.
Except 2 Fast 2 Furious did not even feature the supposed star of the show, Vin Diesel: an actor so born to do this, he even changed his name to sound more like a car.
As critic Scott Mendelson observed: “The ‘failure’ to make a proper sequel for the first eight years created the kind of expanded universe that Hollywood now craves.” Inadvertently, Fast & Furious had an Avengers Assemble feel of a gang whose backstories we all now knew finally coming together.
As did the stakes of the plots , the outlandishness of the action, and the star names among the cast: Gal Gadot, Dwayne Johnson, Luke Evans, Jason Statham, Kurt Russell, Charlize Theron, even Helen bloody Mirren.
Once they get on the Fast ride, they don’t tend to get off again unless they’re bumped off, and even that’s no guarantee.
According to Michelle Rodriguez, the family line in the first instalment was “something that came out of Vin’s mouth when he didn’t like the line that was there”.
There was Dom and Rodriguez’s Letty, and Dom’s sister Mia , but the Fast extended family also includes crew members such as Gibson, Ludacris, Nathalie Emmanuel and Sung Kang.
In an era when movies have to appeal to all quadrants of the globe, the franchise has been ahead of the pack.
Where these old-school franchises have had to overhaul their backstories to get some diversity in, Fast & Furious had it built in from the start.
Last month, just as Furious 9 was opening in China, Cena made a surprise apology in Mandarin on Chinese social media for describing Taiwan as the first “country” that would see F9 – a big no-no since the Chinese state considers Taiwan a part of China.
As the industry analyst David Gross, of FranchiseRe, points out, F9 opened well in China, taking $136m in its first weekend, but takings plummeted 85% in week two, and a further 57% the week after.
Gross predicts that F9 will do very well to get to Hobbs & Shaw levels , especially given Covid restrictions on cinemas.
Let’s start the guessing game: underwater cars? Souped-up mobility scooters? Vin Diesel dies but is then reincarnated as a car? If we have learned anything, it’s that nothing is off limits.