The Fast and the Furious is one of the most adrenaline filled, thrilling and entertaining as hell action franchise. Over the period of 17 years and 8 films, the action franchise has created a vast pool of characters who have worked with each other in a high-stakes street race cum heist stories. The combined revenue of all the films is in excess of $4 Billion. The franchise was rebooted after four movies as the narrative was going no-where, also it was more a collection of stand-alone movies rather than a cohesive plot spread across the films. Once Justin Lin-directed Fast 5 with Dwayne Johnson, the world entered into a new dawn of high-octane action flicks that are irresistibly crazy and stylistically bang on.
The two central characters of the franchise are Vin Diesel and Paul Walker who played Brian O’ Connor, which was sadly removed after the tragic demise of Paul Walker in 2013. The sequel got delayed but managed to rake in serious dollars. After Paul Walker’s death, now Vin Diesel is the anchor of the franchise around him the story is revolving.
The producer Neal H. Moritz revealed on Bill Simmons’ Podcast that Vin Diesel was not the first actor who was offered this role, it was Timothy Olyphant. Anyways, no one would know how the franchise would have turned up had he accepted the role in the first place.
In the latest installment of Fast and the Furious series, Dom Toretto turned a bad guy as it was revealed that he had an unknown child with Elena Neves (his love interest from Fast 5) who is now kidnapped by Charlize Theron’s character, Cypher. He was forced to work for her, betray his own team only to put up an elaborate plan in motion with the Shaw brothers to retrieve his child from Cipher’s plane.
The story seems okayish but the execution was tacky. It seemed like a marketing ploy instead of an actual plot device. Vin Diesel has a very limited emotional range, he definitely tried to emote but he couldn’t tug the audience’s heartstrings. The movie is screaming one word “Family” but it’s still one big mindless action film pretending to be grounded in relationships. Let’s bring back high-street races and explosions in a simpler plot.
