Typically, when a new world is born, it struggles to be. This is true of many things, but it is also true of Hollywood. Transitions in the industry do not come quickly, and they do not come uniformly. They are awkward, halting, self-aware. Flashpoints of change only become apparent in the rearview mirror.
Looking at Hollywood’s big hits for 2000, the first year of the new millennium, that would seem to be borne out. The year’s top-grosser is a sequel, Mission: Impossible 2, and there’s X-Men (a movie we have never covered on this newsletter) lurking away further down, but most of the big hits are true-blue originals, studio fare for adults. After the Tom Cruise flick, it’s Gladiator, Cast Away, What Woman Want. There are two movies there I have legitimately never heard of in my life (what on Earth is Dinosaur?). That was the Hollywood playbook of the 90s: big productions with big concepts led by the biggest movie stars (Russell Crowe, Tom Hanks, Mel Gibson - sadly). Franchises are just part of the firmament. They help speed things along.
Hop over to 2001, though, and a switch has flipped. The top two grossers are the very first Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings films. Shrek is there. As is Ocean’s Eleven, and the ill-fated Tim Burton Planet of the Apes. Franchises, suddenly, are at the top of the pile, and it’s clear a new generation of them has kicked off There are still glimmers of the 90s - sequels to Jurassic Park and The Mummy, a Hannibal movie, and most notably Michael Bay’s Titanic ripoff Pearl Harbor, but the vibe has shifted.
(Also, it’s worth noting that there are five major events listed on 2001’s Wikipedia page for cinema, and the only one of them not related to a movie releasing is Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman’s divorce. As the hinge event that unlocked the rest of both their respective careers, this is worthy of its place).
Looking at the years ahead, it would never unshift. Franchises would only tighten their grip. Indeed, it’s notable how much of our present state is attributable to 2001’s movies - we’ve harped on about X-Men and Spider-Man, but Potter and Rings were just as influential in kickstarting a huge genre blockbuster boom, while Shrek feels like the blueprint for where animation, with the general exception of Pixar, would go throughout the next two decades.
It’s a sea change year, and it came quickly. But even in a time like this, nothing happens all at once. Real change, sometimes, only becomes visible a quarter mile after you passed it.
Welcome to The Fast and the Furious. It’s the first one.
I think that every great epic adventure should start small. The Lord of the Rings doesn’t get to the epic fantasy instantly. Its first 100 pages narrate some small guys walking through some fields. We begin in the Shire because it’s a world that fits within our field of vision. It’s a place for the little guys to go, the ones who often fall into the margins. Gradually, the epic story opens out. The journey becomes more perilous and the stakes become higher and the characters multiply, but we care because it started small. We’ve watched the world open out in front of us.
The Fast and the Furious, too, begins in the Shire. Even by 2001 standards, this was not some grandiose blockbuster. Set against its successors, and the eventual mode the franchise would adopt about midway through, it is positively miniscule. It is the DVD-player-theft to the extreme of Tyrese-in-space.
That’s the fun of tracking the way Fast has evolved. In its present form, it is a resolutely 21st century creation, all gigantic tentpole spectacle and convoluted mythology and spin-offs. Like Mission: Impossible, though, the franchise has lasted as long as the century, which means it began before that new-age archetype came into being.
Those are a lot of five-dollar words, so the long and the short of it is that The Fast and the Furious is better understood as a reaction to the cinema of the 90s than anything that came since. You don’t have to dig deep into the archives for that. Paul Walker, the first actor to sign up for the project, wanted it to be a combination of Days of Thunder (car Top Gun, up to and including the involvement of Tony Scott and Tom Cruise) and Donnie Brasco (crime stuff, smarter than any of these movies will end up being) Enough digital ink has been spilled on the way that this film is kind of the Force Awakens to Point Break’s A New Hope.
Oh, the 90s. Back then you just needed a dream and a wish, and studios would fork over $30 million to let you make your mid-tier action movie. Such an era has passed now. It lives on in whispers, like the absolute dreck that Netflix inexplicably funnel multi-hundred-million budgets into, like Red Notice or The Gray Man. Within that world, Fast and the Furious becomes a charming artefact, an image of a past already fading into the mist.
Trivia time. Sorry for interrupting the flow, but there are so many cool facts about this franchise and I like telling you them.
Considering that the franchise has gradually come to orbit around Vin Diesel’s mighty bald dome, it comes as a genuine surprise that Diesel was neither the first actor to sign up for the role (as established, that was Walker), nor the first choice for the role of Dominic Toretto at all. That privilege went to Timothy Olyphant, an actor best described as remarkably different from Vin Diesel.
Can you imagine the alternate timeline where Olyphant is Toretto? The mind reels, or at least mind does. What happens in this timeline? Does Olyphant also step away from the franchise for a while? Do we get Justified? What does Vin Diesel do instead? There is only one certainty to such uncertainty, and that is that Timothy Olyphant being John Cena’s brother would be vastly more believable than what we got.
Another trivia fact: Eminem was offered the role of Brian before Paul Walker. I believe sincerely that, in the Olyphant and Eminem timeline, COVID-19 died in the Wuhan flea markets and never spread.
Final fact: Vin Diesel’s real name is Mark Sinclair. It’s not Vincent Diesel. It is, I repeat, MARK FUCKING SINCLAIR!!
I do not believe it takes much of a logical leap to explain why Vin Diesel changed his name from Mark Sinclair. I tell you this fact only to marvel at its pristine beauty. It is a wonderful world that we live in, full of endless surprise.
The Fast and the Furious is an incredibly potent time capsule. It is a movie that simply could not exist at a later period in time than it does. It is so quintessentially late turn-of-the-century in its aesthetics and soundtrack and meatheaded plotting that it feels like a nostalgia-fuelled pastiche that somebody made in 2022. It is giving those racing games at the arcade covered in flame graphics called “EPIC RACING” or something. It is giving Nickelback. It is giving Grand Theft Auto III.
This might seem a little odd given these newsletters have always been a little on the review-y side, but I really don’t think the quality of these movies, in the early going at least, is overly important. Really, it doesn’t matter if The Fast and the Furious is good or bad. It’s a modest commercial hit that will have, when all is said and done, have spawned ten sequels and a spin-off. Reviews are irrelevant. It’d be like giving a detailed opinion of the sea.
With that in mind, let’s get this bit out of the way: I’m aware that this first movie is beloved by some people, but I think it’s just okay. The centre of the movie is perfect, but the perfection is interrupted by an addiction to clutter. The movie doesn’t quite understand the crystalline excellence of Paul Walker and Vin Diesel’s homoerotic car rivalry, so it stuffs in characters and plotlines and intrigue that lack that central idea’s potency. It wants to be a twisty noir-ish crime thriller, but it is simply far too stupid to be legitimately suspenseful. The third act is also pretty atrocious as a culmination of what came before, with every character motivation and point of tension dissolving into a slurry. They just needed that final drag race, really.
Nostalgia for Fast in its original form is rife, and is found in its purest form in the YouTube comments section of any trailer for a new instalment of the franchise. Here’s a sample I collected just now.
“I love how in the first movie, the fact that Brian was an undercover cop was all the tension we needed.”
“Legends say Fast&Furious was once about street racing...”
“I miss the days when Fast & Furious was about street racing too.”
I respect these people, but I disagree with their ethos. For me, the purest form of Fast is the purest form of Vin, what I like to call “premium unleaded Diesel”, and the later entries give me more of that. Probably because Diesel wasn’t involved from the start, Fast and the Furious feels spiritually more influenced by Paul Walker’s vibe, and that is a vibe that interests me less.
I sure spent a long time on something I said was irrelevant there, didn’t I? If there was ever an encapsulation of this newsletter’s vibe, it’s that.
Anyhow.
What struck me most about Fast and the Furious on this watch was how deeply unlikely the franchise’s eventual fate feels. It really is just a typical 2000-era studio action flick, entirely shorn of pretension to grander mythology or profound themes. There is no real hint of wider context, nor any suggestion that the story needs to continue beyond this. Obviously, the series’ eventual path to mega blockbusterdom was not linear, but this first movie, in all its modesty, underscores just how odd it all is. It’s like if the Tony Scott film Unstoppable had eight sequels where Denzel Washington and Chris Pine drove trains for a global spy agency.
God, that’s a good idea. I’m ready and waiting if you are, Hollywood.
It’s especially weird given how much of the original mixture survives. Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez and Jordana Brewster are still central to the franchise today, and of course Paul Walker would be. Despite the troubling implications of “Race Wars”, the series would keep at that idea until deep into the sequels. With impressive attention to detail, the backstory about Dom’s father is actually pretty coherent with the eventual flashbacks in F9, release twenty years later. Even as it softened itself for four-quadrant PG-13 appeal, the franchise would never lose its love of ogling shots of dancing women in hot pants at the side of drag races. Some things never change.
Even the common charge that the series used to be about street racing and changed focus to magic surveillance MacGuffins and girls with special DNA and cyborg super-soldiers and “Mr. Nobody” (valid) doesn’t quite have as much weight as you would think. The Fast and the Furious is about a lot of things, such as DVD player thefts and undercover cops and tuna sandwiches and how music fell off for a good while after the 90s, but it is only nominally about racing.
Don’t get me wrong, those racing sequences are great, especially the big street drag race that uses some borderline surrealist techniques to illustrate the fastness of the zooms. But there are only about three of them. When the movie gets to “Race Wars”, you can feel its interest wandering like a bored kid forced to sit through Goodfellas. The notion that Fast was once this detailed and loving portrait of car culture is honestly laughable. This movie, ostensibly the purest of the pure, is interested in cars in the way that a child is interested in Hot Wheels. Racing is about timing your press of the special zoomy NOS button which makes you win. It’s not complicated.
Of course, the Fast movies are about family. In that vein, the series isn’t there yet. Aside from maybe Brian and Mia, nobody in this movie seems to like one another that much. Dom’s crew mainly consists of people he feels openly different about, and Letty is more arm candy than the active participant and forever wife that she’ll become in later movies. For a franchise that would eventually become defined by the 500lb weight of its own sentimentality, this first entry is surprisingly brusque. It fits the macho 90s dude-flick glaze this movie is going for, but it’s a borrowed flavour. It’s not Fast & Furious yet. It’s not projecting a level of unflinching togetherness that will later allow Vin Diesel to invite a man who murdered his friend to his backyard barbecue.
It’s a pilot episode, and like most pilot episodes, it’s more of a trial run than a proof of concept. It offers plenty to enjoy in its own right, but looking back along the line of ten Fast movies now, this first flick’s lasting legacy is simple: it came first, because something had to. That’s okay. Every story needs a beginning.
You wouldn’t care when Frodo and Sam made it to the slopes of Mount Doom if you hadn’t seem them cutting about some fields for half an hour. For “Frodo and Sam”, substitute “Tyrese and Ludacris” and for “the slopes of Mount Doom”, substitute “outer space in a car”. You know what it is.
Does The Fast and the Furious mostly foul up its third act and fail to satisfyingly resolve most of its ongoing stories? Yeah, probably. But it doesn’t matter, because it ends just right.
Why do they race each other? How long is that road? How terrified must that train driver be? Why didn’t Dom die in that crash?
All good questions. All completely useless.
Logic doesn’t mean anything here. It’s male tenderness expressed through roaring car engines. It’s a blatant disregard for the laws of physics. It’s absurd and unnecessary high stakes. It’s stupid, and it’s wonderful.
It’s goddamn Fast & Furious. Don’t be boring. Don’t bring your questions and your nitpicks here. Just surrender to the feeling.
Next time: Too fast, too furious? Nah. 2 Fast 2 Furious. In its first sequel, the franchise would jettison Vin Diesel, begin its truly astonishing run of inconsistent titles, and bring series legends Tyrese and Ludacris home.
Reader, I’ll admit something. I’ve never seen this one, nor the following two. This is the first newsletter I’ve ever written here that’s new to me.
Brave new world. Apparently Tyrese says the word “hoasis” in this one.