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zwolanerd

I guess I just like liking things

I have seen exactly two of the Fast & Furious movies, so I don’t feel I can weigh in on the whole series, but I do want to say a few things.

First, this naming scheme rivals the Rambo series for pure awesomeness/insanity:

1. The Fast and the Furious (2001)
2. 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003)
3. The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006)
4. Fast & Furious (2009)
5. Fast Five (2011)
6. Fast & Furious 6 (2013)
7. Furious 7 (2015)

Now take into consideration that The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift takes place chronologically after Fast & Furious 6 (and before Furious 7), and I think it’s clear we’re all the subject of some sort of experiment. But, hey, mice get cheese after navigating the maze, and we get some crazy driving and some A-1 nutso stunts, so it all works out.

A friend of mine dragged me to the sixth movie, and I agreed to go because I had dragged him to some pretty terrible things and because it had The Rock. You can have a pretty terrible movie and have The Rock and he’d still be pretty great in it. Scientists are working on why that is, exactly, but the results have been repeatable and predictable, so it’s probably true now.

The sixth movie was a lot of fun. There’s car chases and fights and they don’t worry a whole lot about things like physics and gravity, and it’s fine! No one worries about it. Seeing the sixth movie in the series had not yet caused me to go back and watch the first five before the seventh one came out, and I think maybe that’s a problem, because there’s this whole “we’re a family” undercurrent that doesn’t really hit with me and I wonder if maybe it would had I ingested the whole backstory. Seems to me you can have a team without it being “family,” and growling about it (Vin Diesel) isn’t going to change anything. But whatever! They’re family and that’s how they’re doing things.

Furious 7 picks up where 6 left off: Jason Statham is mad about what Vin’s family did to his brother (either hurt him real bad or killed him, I honestly don’t remember) so he wants to hurt/kill all of them, and since he’s ex-British military he’s pretty good at doing those things. From there it’s a matter of finding things/people before he does and it all involves a lot of driving. The main takeaway from these movies is that most problems can be solved by driving, and no one in these movies ever heard the word “carpooling” before. Everywhere they go, they take 5-8 cars.

There are two sequences that deserve special mention, and I guess these could be considered spoilers, only one of them was already in the trailer and the other one you could probably assume was going to happen if you knew anything at all about how fast and furious these people are/were:

  1. They jump a car between three towers of those really tall building in Dubai.
  2. A dude runs up a bus that is falling off a cliff and jumps but isn’t going to make it, but then another driver spins around fast and near the edge of the cliff and he’s able to grab hold of the spoiler (alert!) on the back of the car and he’s fine.

Also, The Rock does his signature Rock Bottom move on a guy through a glass table and that was pretty sweet.

I’m never going to love these movies – I’m not a “car guy” even a little, unless we’re talking Batmobiles – but I’m never going to hate them, either. They’re fun enough, but I’m not going to get emotionally invested in them.

That said, they do a tribute at the end of the movie (as part of the movie, not a separate thing) to Paul Walker and his character. As you no doubt know, Paul Walker was killed in a car crash before filming was completed, and the filmmakers decided to work around that as best they could. There were some changes to the script, and they used a combination of CGI and Paul’s brothers to add a few more shots of his character in the movie. Again, I’m not emotionally invested in the series, but I thought they handled it very well. It was very touching.

At this point, I’m probably committed to Fast and/or Furious 8 and whatever’s after that, but I’m still not sold on going back to the beginning of the series. Convince me otherwise!

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