8fer

Everything Wrong With the Fast and Furious Franchise

The original The Fast and the Furious, back in 2001, was a poorly made summer film in which Paul Walker and Vin Diesel did a lot of driving, yelling, and dirty looks. The plot was only there to support the film’s many street racing scenes, where there was no real display of skill except for that generated by CGI. The Fast and Furious movies are all very exaggerated and unrealistic.

In the sequel, 2 Fast 2 Furious, Walker went solo and the film itself was basically a copy of the first one with way more up misogyny. For example, in the first race scene, Paul walker and 3 other characters (never seen again after the race scene.) are preparing to race. The camera focuses on the car of the only black driver in the race as a barely dressed woman walks up to him. She takes his hand and puts it on her breast and says, “this is your win or lose. But if you win, you get her too” she points at another poorly dressed woman. This scene is also slightly racist as only the black man has the longing for women.

After  2 more stereotypical street racing movies, the fifth installment in the series, Fast Five, earned an oddly large amount of positivity and good reviews, even from those who has previously disliked the movies. Fast Five is “certified fresh” on Rotten Tomatoes, with 77% positive reviews, and critics saying that it :injects new life into the franchise.

Fast Five begins where the fourth film, Fast and Furious left off. After helping Dom escape from a prison bus, Brian and his girlfriend who happens to be Dom’s sister Mia move to Rio to hide out. However, as soon as they arrive they get involved with a crazy theft supercars from a moving passenger train which ends with Dom and Paul driving a car off a 100 foot tall cliff and jumping into a lake right before impact without a scratch. After this, a typical tough-guy DSS (diplomatic security special agent), played by the rock comes into play, causing the main characters a lot of difficulty throughout the movie. Meanwhile, they discover that the theft was not for the cars, but for a small chip inside one of the cars with  details of a dangerous drug cartel. When Dom and Brian realize how rich the cartel’s leader is, they decide to stage a daring heist.

Here’s where the story gets interesting. We see the standard heist movie scenes of gathering a crew, planning the heist, talking about what they’ll do with their cut, and then towards the end of the movie, we find out that we never really knew what the whole plan included. The train chase scene that op Fast Five is well made and gripping for the audience. So is its closing heist, where two cars pull a huge vault around the streets of Rio, wreaking havoc all along the way. There’s a car chase scene towards the beginning of  Furious 6 that is also very well made. The closing scene, that includes the gang stopping the antagonists from escaping on a plane, is also a good scene.

Even though these movies do have gripping scenes, most of them are very unrealistic and cartoon like. For example, The Rock falls almost 15 feet onto the top of a car, then is launched from it, and lands in the middle of the road,then starts shooting at the car without showing any evidence of injury. Vin Diesel jumps from one car to another to save Letty, and makes it look like ha can fly and land on a car 15 feet away while holding letty without a scratch. Most importantly, the final action scene with the plane chase takes about 15 minutes, meaning the runway had to be at least 100 miles long.

Here’s the primary concern, all of the movies have two well crafted and gripping action scenes(beginning and end), but the meat of the movies is just a bunch of tough-guy nonsense. Both films run about two hours and ten minutes, and there's just no reason for that,  because that means lots of scenes of things going boom, yes, but that also means lots of scenes of people talking to each other, and those scenes tend to bore an audience of an action movie.

This is my best 2fer ever, because I put a lot of work into this one. I researched for hours and watched a lot of the Fast and Furious movies to analyze them. This also took me way longer than it should have, because I wanted to make sure it was crisp and well said.   

Works Cited

http://jalopnik.com/the-ten-most-unrealistic-scenes-from-the-fast-furious-1695885893

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/fast_five/

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/fast_and_furious_6/