2 fast 2 furious, or ejecto seato, cuz!

in which tyrese plays the abbey road medley

Dec 03, 2022

Fast & Furious: A tribute to 2 Fast 2 Furious | EW.com

“Sequels suck. By definition, they’re inferior films.”

Any good nerd would happily refute fucking Randy from Scream 2’s terrible opinion. Aliens. Spider-Man 2. Thor: The Dark World. Sequels can be wonderful. Every great sequel builds on a promising first film and refines the formula while maintaining the things everybody liked from before. You know how you’re much better at a video game on New Game Plus? Well, yeah. Second go-arounds are time for learning your lessons and getting your shit in order.

Except when your original star leaves.

Part of why the Fast & Furious story is such a fun and odd one in Hollywood franchise history is that it refuses to listen to the rules. Virtually every long-running series out there was made by a powerhouse first entry or a breakout sequel. Fast does not listen to your rules. The three follow-ups to Fast and the Furious are the least-known and least-appreciated entries in the franchise by every metric. Until the series bucks up its ideas in the 2010s, a full decade after the car has left the garage, every subsequent entry was another spin of the wheel, a new version of the franchise every time. It’s kind of like how the past three Terminator films were all franchise reboots intended to start their own trilogy, except marginally more coherent. Somehow, they kept the train on the rails, but it’s a wonder how.

This is the series’ chaotic era. And it all happened because renowned actor and Dungeons & Dragons enthusiast Mark Sinclair, better known as Vin Diesel, decided that he would bet all his chips on The Chronicles of Riddick.

(Did you know that Vin Diesel was called Mark Sinclair? I confess to you, reader, that I did know, but I forgot about it until now.)

Mark Sinclair is a perfectionist. It’s difficult to tell what his definition of perfect is, given his filmography consists almost entirely of middlingly-reviewed action movies, but we cannot quibble his belief system. His perfectionism told him to cause chaos on the set of Fast X that chased franchise stalwart Justin Lin out of the director’s chair. It told him to beef relentlessly with Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson out of a sincere and committed belief that the actor had not locked into his performance enough. In this case, it told him that the proposed script for a Fast sequel wasn’t up to snuff.

There are two aspects of this story that are insane to me. First, Diesel was offered $25 million to return. That is a bonkers fee. For context, that’s more than the standard rates asked for by Ryan Reynolds or Joaquin Phoenix for their billion-dollar superhero movies.

Second, Diesel has been quoted by Variety as saying in retrospect, “They didn't take a Francis Ford Coppola approach to it. They approached it like they did sequels in the '80s and '90s, when they would drum up a new story unrelated for the most part, and slap the same name on it.” This is remarkably telling of Diesel’s lethally serious approach to the franchise, in which he sincerely believes Fast & Furious to be equal to The Godfather.

Amusingly, Diesel would later get his wish, in a time where his control of the franchise was firmer - F9, with its important flashbacks featuring different actors playing younger versions of the characters, is conspicuously riffing on The Godfather: Part 2. Illuminating.

Diesel’s leave of absence from the franchise would effectively last until the fourth entry, which is remarkably weird given how tightly it has grown to be associated with him. This isn’t even the only franchise he walked away from because of script frustrations - he would also refuse to sign on for the sequel to his other early-2000s action hit directed by Rob Cohen, xXx. (Much like Fast, Vin would win in this situation, with the Vin-less sequel faltering at the box office, necessitating a big-ticket return of the franchise star years later. Vin always wins.)

It’s rare to have two breakout hit franchise starters in back to back years in which you are the lead. Generally, one would consider that an opportunity for career consolidation. Not Vin. He is a man who marches to the beat of his own drum, and in 2003, the drums told him to reject the obvious sequels and go all-Vin on his personal pet project, a spin-off/sequel to the 2000 sci-fi action film Event Horizon featuring its main character, Riddick. Vin loves Riddick so fucking much, and he used every inch of his post-Fast cachet on getting a mega-budget follow up made. The result was 2004’s The Chronicles of Riddick. It flopped at the box office, failing to make back its budget, but Vin’s dedication to Riddick was Herculean in its tenacity.

The story of Riddick has many chapters, but it is a tale of triumph, one inextricably linked with his journey in and out and into the Fast franchise again. We will return to Richard B. Riddick. Don’t you worry.

So, Vin was out. That’s quite a body blow for a budding franchise, but Fast & Furious is a pro at rolling with the punches. It is a series that truly embodies the sigma grindset of improvise, adapt, overcome. With no Vin Diesel, and no original director Rob Cohen, the sequel simply refocused on the other lead character and gave him ample back-up. In doing so, it would outgross the original film, and inadvertently lay the seeds for the big comeback special a few movies down the line.

Sigma. Grindset.

More fun trivia for you. Cohen was out, so he was replaced with John Singleton. If that name rings a faint bell, it’s because Singleton shot to fame with the modern classic Boyz n the Hood at the unbelievable age of 23, for which he was nominated deservedly for an Oscar, and would later go on to direct the likes of Rosewood and Baby Boy. Singleton is Los Angeles to the bone, so his hiring feels pretty apt for a franchise that began on the streets of LA.

With apologies for Rob Cohen, Singleton is the first auteur in a franchise that would rope in some fascinating creatives like Justin Lin and James Wan. Considering his track record of casting top rappers from Tupac to Ice Cube to Snoop Dogg, it’s reasonable also to credit him with the casting of eventual franchise mainstays Tyrese Gibson (who had established a working relationship with Singleton on Baby Boy) and Ludacris, who, as every Fast fan ought to know, are essential to the recipe here.

Point being - respect on John Singleton’s name. You laid some vital bricks in the road, pal. Rest in peace.

EMERGENCY SEQUEL TITLE DISCUSSION!!

Sorry. You just stumbled into a new recurring section of these newsletters.

I have already referred to the franchise’s odd naming system before, and I realise you may not understand what this means. Basically, in a delightful sequence which I am entirely uncertain is intended or not, the Fast & Furious sequels all use an entirely different naming scheme. There is not a single film’s name that matches another. Respectively, we get number pun, subtitle, reboot-styled simplified name, “Fast” plus number, “Fast & Furious” plus number, “Furious” plus number, odd verbal pun and abbreviation (‘F9’). I was utterly thrilled to hear that the tenth instalment will use Roman numerals, putting the franchise just one film away from a perfect run.

Anyhow. These titles deserve their time in the sun, so I’d like to take some time out each week for that. This week, we reckon with 2 Fast 2 Furious. Faced with the conventional options of number or subtitle, the franchise chose Option C. In doing so, this continued a venerable tradition which continued in seminal contributions such as Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa and Step Up 2: The Streets.

I adore these titles, and I adore them more because it can so easily go wrong. Remember when they tried to sell the 2015 Fantastic Four reboot as Fant4stic? No. Good lord, no. Fuck out of here with that. You wouldn’t piss on the Mona Lisa, would you?

Controversial proposition. Possibly blasphemous?

It was a good thing that Vin Diesel left this franchise for a bit.

Oh, don’t gasp too hard. The very premise of this entire series is that Vin Diesel is a totemic creative force in 21st century popular culture, a glowering statue looming above us all in all his majesty. I’m not going back on that. Rather, I think it’s a reflection of how effectively 2 Fast 2 Furious turns its lemons into lemonade, and in doing so, establishes a franchise precedent for scrappy improvisation that will serve it immensely well in the many, many years to come.

The excellent Blank Check podcast episode on this movie posed that, if Vin had returned for this movie, it would have been diminishing returns from the first, and I think I agree with that. The first movie gets a lot out of the Vin/Walker dynamic, but it tells a story with the characters that actually feels quite complete. You get the sense that a straight sequel to Fast would have tried to go back to the same well with the characters, since that’s what everyone responded to, and finding said well almost empty. When the franchise eventually brought Vin back into the fold, it had begun its segue into more of an ensemble franchise that let both characters hang out with more people than just one another, and that just about fixed the issue - but it’s unlikely a hypothetical Vin/Walker 2 Fast would have done that.

Instead, we have a sequel that barely feels like a sequel, and there’s actually a lot of utility in that. Almost everything in 2 Fast, from the characters to the locations to the set-pieces, feels box-fresh, and there’s never a risk of overfamiliarity. The movie feels like it’s working hard to impress you, to overcome the natural scepticism that Vin’s absence might entail, and Singleton’s direction is very much dialled into that “show ‘em a good time” ethos. The action is crisper and more outlandish, the jokes broader, the stupid jokes stupider.

It’s all exceedingly glossy and sunny and utterly artificial - if Fast one built a world that feels like it could maybe exist in the backstreets of our own, then 2 Fast is an alternate universe, a kind of benevolent car utopia in which the forces of institutional cruelty and criminal exploitation can’t match up to the coordinated efforts of a determined street-racing crew of approximately 150 drivers. I say that as a compliment, mind. No matter what a YouTube comment will have you believe, the Fast series has never seriously aspired for realism, and it has only excelled when it ceases to bother. 2 Fast gives the franchise a hefty push on the way to getting Tyrese in space, and I am immensely thankful for it.

Oh, hey, Tyrese is in this!

Look at him go! For those reading this newsletter without having seen the movie (shame on you), this is the moment he throws a guy out of his car using an ejector seat and yells “ejecto seato, cuz!”.

Tyrese in this movie is really just a placeholder for what is to come. The man is an artist and this franchise is his canvas, but I would describe his work in 2 Fast as more practice pencil drawings as opposed to the vistas he will later paint. He’s good, and charismatic, but they haven’t found the character’s beautifully stupid heart yet. It’s much the same with Ludacris, only that Tej in this movie is even more removed from the Tej who will later hang around for the entire back half of the series. The man who will later become the LeBron James of ~~soccer~~ the hacking world displays precisely no interest in computers in this one. It’s very funny.

What’s more important is that these guys brought a new energy to the franchise, and, in doing so, they got their foot in the door. Eight years later, when Vin cracks out his Rolodex for the big all-in reunion of Fast Five, both guys will be high up his list.

Incidentally, here is an excerpt of a news article from a fansite reporting on Ludacris’ return to the franchise in 2010:

No offense to Ludacris, but the character of Tej added nothing to that movie. Seriously, you had the worst role in the film. Do we want to see that character return? Might as well bring back that God awful Devon 'pancake face' Aoki while they're at it. Long as you stay in the background then I guess it won't be too bad. You saying, "I got this." and "Yep yep." a hundred times might get annoying.

This is an ignorant, ignorant man. God, old fansites were rough. Never, whatever you do, go and read an old Ain’t It Cool News article. Shiver.

Also, Devon Aoki is actually good in this movie, so nyeh.

We’ve established it’s better than the first. Is 2 Fast 2 Furious a good movie?

Buddy, you’re asking the wrong questions.

We went over this last week, but I enjoy repeating myself, so let’s do this one last time.

In Jon Bois’ superlative documentary History of the Seattle Mariners (it’s all on YouTube), check it out, he uses Seattle’s bafflingly inconsistent baseball team as a platform to redefine success as something that exists outside of the typical metrics of good and bad, win or lose. Instead, success is a measure of experience, of surprise and effort and joy. Success is, in a lot of ways, being silly and committed to your silliness.

Basically, what I’m trying to say is that it doesn’t matter if any of these films are empirically good. That sounds kind of anti-intellectual, the sort of thinking that lets fans defend shit like Black Adam as “not for critics” and therefore “allowed to be bad”, but I genuinely believe these movies have created their own standard of success. They have liberated themselves from Rotten Tomatoes and CinemaScore and Metacritic and the fucking Sight & Sound top 100 poll. They rise and fall entirely on their own terms. You cannot compare 2 Fast 2 Furious to Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. You can only compare it to Tokyo Drift.

I do intend to watch Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles at some point, because I feel like it’s a reasonable prerequisite to have watched the current consensus best film of all time. It’s just hard to fit in between Fast & Furious movies, you know? Whenever I get to it, I’ll block out some time in this newsletter to discuss it in between Fast & Furious 6 or whatever. That feels right.

So, yeah, fine, the actual plot of this movie is generic cop thriller mulch and there is no dramatic tension or trackable character arcs and the movie never really figures out what to do with Paul Walker. Whatever, man. Flaws like that would sink a blockbuster with less gumption, but this is gumption city, goddamn it. This is a sequel that lost 75% of what everyone liked about the first movie, but barrelled forwards anyway.

For a time, I think it would have been easy to dismiss this as a bit of an error, a franchise aberration. The next Fast is the opposite of a sequel to this, and the one after that is a conscious return to the appeal of the first movie. Gradually, though, it’s clawed its way back, with later movies adopting both its cast and its sensibilities. You don’t have Vin jumping between three Dubai towers in a car if Paul Walker doesn’t lay the groundwork by jumping onto a boat with a car. There’s no Tyrese and Ludacris ramming a satellite with a car without “ejecto seato, cuz!”.

After all, they said Abbey Road was a huge step down for The Beatles.

Am I saying that 2 Fast 2 Furious is this franchise’s Abbey Road?

Okay, fine, I’m not. But it’d be fun if I was, right?

Next time: The series ups sticks and swaps actors again with Tokyo Drift, in which director Justin Lin joins the franchise, and a certain Mark Sinclair makes an auspicious return.

Just who is Bow Wow, and how is he Twinkie? Was Han’s name really “Han Seoul-oh” before woke cancel culture made them change it? Why are we so excited about drifting?! Mysteries, with answers. I hope.