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Movie Review: Looking Back at 'The Fast and the Furious' Ahead of 'Hobbs and Shaw'

How does 'The Fast and The Furious' hold up 18 years later? Pretty good, really.

By Sean PatrickPublished 5 years ago 3 min read
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Hobbs and Shaw hits theaters this summer in the very first spinoff of The Fast and the Furious franchise. With that in mind, I am taking a look back at the franchise and each of its evolutionary stages. We begin in 2001 with the very first film in this ever so unusual blockbuster franchise, 2001s The Fast and the Furious.

Paul Walker stars in The Fast and the Furious as Brian O' Connor, Gen-X undercover cop. Brian's assignment is to infiltrate a group of thieves who use souped up street racing cars to rob trucks full of electronic equipment and fence the goods on the black market. His target is Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel), a mechanic by day, god of street racing by night. Dominic claims he can't be beaten in a street race, so Brian challenges him, putting the pink slip to his department issue street racer on the line. In a scene that is visually well-staged and viscerally exciting we watch the racers inside the cars and outside; through what was at the time, cutting edge CGI, we go inside the engines. At the time, it was very cool looking stuff.

Brian blew his engine, overusing his stock of nitrous oxide during the race, and Dominic won his car. When the cops arrive to break up the party, Brian saves Dominic from being arrested and earns Dominic's trust. Dominic's crew, including a badass Michele Rodriguez as Dominic's girlfriend, is suspicious of Brian. However, Dominic's sister Mia (Jordana Brewster) takes to him immediately. As Brian gets close to Dominic, and really close to Dom's sister, he begins to aim his investigation at an Asian street racing gang and their shady leader Johnny Tran (Rick Yune). With a name like Johnny Tran how can he not be a bad guy?

Unfortunately, that investigation goes nowhere and Brian quickly realizes Dom and his crew are the guys pulling the robberies. Now, he must figure out a way to bring them in without killing Dom and without damaging his relationship with Mia. I can't watch The Fast and The Furious without chuckling about the parallels between this film and another Gen-X undercover cop movie with an extreme sports angle, Point Break. Walker's freshly blow dried appearance and vacuous demeanor channels Keanu Reeves' slacker persona to a remarkable degree, it’s truly uncanny at times. And though Diesel is a slightly more menacing presence than Swayze, the performances mirror each other in depth or lack thereof.

Despite the comparison to Point Break, there is a particular appeal to The Fast and the Furious. Where Point Break is very earnest about its action, wishing it to be taken seriously to a point, TheFast and the Furious winks at the audience from time to time. Director Rob Cohen knows the appeal of his film lays entirely with his ability to coordinate the action and keep up the pace. Any moment that the film sits back and exercises its plot is a dead moment. So Cohen intercuts scenes with more than a minute of dialogue with shots of the cool cars and hot babes. The pace is kept up with your typical rap-metal anthems that don't slow down to make sense, they just screech and the action on screen is cut to their beat.

The Fast and the Furious is not a great movie, it's not even a very good movie. But for visceral excitement, it's on a par with the great action pics of the past. It’s goofy as all get out at times, but The Fast and the Furious remains to this day an example of what good, trashy Hollywood action movies are all about.

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About the Creator

Sean Patrick

Hello, my name is Sean Patrick He/Him, and I am a film critic and podcast host for the I Hate Critics Movie Review Podcast I am a voting member of the Critics Choice Association, the group behind the annual Critics Choice Awards.

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