Twitter puts its best minds on pinpointing when the Fast & Furious franchise abandoned reality completely
Was it Luke Hobbs flexing a broken arm? Tej and Roman literally accelerating into space? Whatever the answer, there's clearly no going back as Fast X approaches
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When the first trailer for Fast X dropped in February, one balls-to-the-wall scene stood out among the rest of the standard turbo-mode fare: the moment when two helicopters, after dropping a car from the cockpit onto the car protagonist Dom (Vin Diesel) is driving, crash into each other and explode while trying to drag Dom from the highway. The upcoming tenth film in the franchise, Fast X has ludicrously capacious shoes to fill: but when, exactly, did they get so capacious?
Naturally, Twitter is on the scene. Over the past few days, a tweet probed the underlying question behind much of the Fast & Furious franchise: how the hell did we get so far off the mortal coil?
The original call for a think tank on the franchise’s surrealism came from actor and comedian Kevin Fredericks, who uses the handle @KevOnStage. His original Tweet read as follows: “What was the moment Fast and the Furious abandoned reality? I was trying to think of the exact point.”
The responses rolled in fast (and furious… come on, laugh!). There’s the moment when Tej (Ludacris) and Roman (Tyrese Gibson) literally leave Earth in F9 (another F9 highlight: that Spiderman-style rope swing that somehow both Dom and Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) survived.
There’s the F7 highlight when Luke Hobbs (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson) breaks a full arm cast with just a simple flex of his bicep. Even earlier down the line, there’s the infamous safe-stealing palooza in F5.
But the true origin of the insanity might go back even further: more than a few users opined that the series lost them after Tokyo Drift, which was released all the way back in… 2006. As Jesse Pinkman might say: They can’t keep getting away with it!
Fast X premieres in theaters on May 19, 2023.
25 Comments
Fast X is not the ninth movie in the franchise. It’s the tenth, or 11th if you count Hobbes and Shaw. Seriously?
You beat me to it. Maybe they meant 9th sequel? I am being charitable.
Look, you can’t expect the A.V. Club writers they plucked out of a Starbucks on Lankershim to understand Roman numerals, or Latin numerals, or basic grammar, or…
I love how they quietly change the articles after we all saw it as the ninth.
The first movie is the only correct answer. The NOS; the “danger to manifold” scene; cars simultaneously doing wheelies and burnouts; not one, but TWO women willing to fuck Ja Rule if he wins a street race; and the pièce de résistance, Dom’s crew of thieves risking life and limb against shotgun-wielding truck drivers protecting their precious cargo of…VCRs and TV/VCR combos? PANASONIC brand VCRs and TV/VCR combos?
Plus, it was the movie that decided that Vin Diesel was a charismatic lead. Now that’s implausible.
I think that was Pitch Black.
Obligatory:
Don’t forget the 10 second Supra that was pretty closely matched to a low-end Ferrari.
I’d say the first five films are fairly grounded in reality, bar the odd ejector seat or safe dragging down the streets of Brazil.Furious 6 is when it started to get really silly. I still like that one though, never ending runway scene or not.
The whole end of the 7th movie. Where Dom drives up a ramp (floor of top of parking lot caves in) and launches his car at a helicopter. His only injury is that his heart stops(wut?) so hes dead. Letty, who had lost her memory previous due to an accident, cries over him and says she remembers him and she loves him so much. Then puts doms big ass cross chain on his chest. He then wakes up and takes a deep breath. Thats the power of FamilyEverything in prior movies are very improbable but could potentially happen. This scene is when they became magical superhumans
I know it’s a fan-favorite for obvious Paul Walker reasons, but F7 lost me. The Rock walking several blocks with a minigun. Vin Diesel demolishing a parking deck by stomping on it. I just couldn’t. The Rock flexing out of his cast was the one thing in that sequence I could buy. I head-canoned it as his arm was already healed, and the doctor was going to take it off the next day.
I laughed so hard at the cast scene. I had the same head-canon as you. I still think it my be possible, someone needs to run an experiment and a worlds strongest man to see if he could break a cast in a similar fashion or my opening/closing his arm
I haven’t seen all of them (I think 7 was the last one I saw the whole movie), but I have come to appreciate the total batshit insanity they’ve somehow decided to go with. Even forgetting all the completely physically impossible stunts they do, just the fact that this group of street racing hijackers is now apparently a super-heroic international anti-terrorist team is so ridiculous on it’s face that you can’t help but lean into the crazy.That said, the “flex out of the cast” moment might be my favorite moment from the series.
Oh, I appreciate the insanity too. I’ve since gone back to watch F8 of the Furious and saw Fast 9 in theaters. They’re great, insane stunts and all. But for whatever reason, the climax of F7 is just too much all at once for me.
While it’s is wild to see how far the movies have come from charismatic street-level criminals stealing VCRs off the backs of trucks to world-saving super heroes… I’m good with it. The series essentially shifted genres and I think today it sits somewhere between James Bond and the MCU, whereas it started in the neighborhood of Gone in 60 Seconds or a Millennial version of Point Break.Everyone rags on Vin Diesel, and I can’t really blame them, but the dude loves comics and loves D&D and I love the same shit and I see what he’s doing with these films and I can’t complain.
To me, it was all pretty realistic until Dom started playing Candy Crash Saga on his phone while driving, in the middle of a heist. That’s when they lost me.
When they hired this guy as head writer
Idk man, they’re all cartoons but 3-8 kept them at least on this side of “plausible,” like most good action movies. Suspension of disbelief, so at least it makes sense within the world of the movie. Go too far, you lose the audience. Not far enough, the audience is bored.
Justin Lin’s direction has been great, but nowhere do I hear anyone giving credit to writer Chris Morgan— this guy was the architect of bringing characters from broad archetypes into continue development over multiple movies, starting with Fast 4. Whatever your feelings on them, he didn’t write Fast 9, and it shows— it’s a dumb action movie, sure, but dumb in ways the previous movies avoided. It starts with Michelle Rodriguez wearing an apron, in a kitchen (excuse me), and sends two characters to space by the end (for which they face zero international repercussions). The action sequences were well-staged, but it’s the writing that has made the series enduring, and Fast 9 (and probably X) don’t have it, because Chris Morgan didn’t write them.And yes, I know Fast 7 had a nuclear submarine in it. Justin Lin could’ve sold that. James Wan was just a director collecting a paycheck.
Idk man, they’re all cartoons but 3-8 kept them at least on this side of “plausible,” like most good action movies. Suspension of disbelief, so at least it makes sense within the world of the movie. Go too far, you lose the audience. Not far enough, the audience is bored.
Justin Lin’s direction has been great, but nowhere do I hear anyone giving credit to writer Chris Morgan— this guy was the architect of bringing characters from broad archetypes into continued development over multiple movies, starting with Fast 4. Whatever your feelings on them, he didn’t write Fast 9, and it shows— it’s a dumb action movie, sure, but dumb in ways the previous movies avoided. It starts with Michelle Rodriguez wearing an apron, in a kitchen (excuse me), and sends two characters to space by the end (which really feels like it should be illegal somehow? anyone know an expert on space law?). Lin’s action sequences were well-staged, but it’s the writing that has made the series enduring, and Fast 9 (and probably X) don’t have it, because Chris Morgan didn’t write them.And yes, I know Fast 7 had a nuclear submarine in it. Justin Lin could’ve sold that. James Wan was just a director collecting a paycheck.
15 minutes into the first movie?
which one had ronda rousey? That movie had a car chase scene where they were jumping from skyscraper to skyscraper. It’s the first time I remember the audience laughing at the stupidity of what they were watching.
Yeah, the safe killed it for me. A movie that’s non-stop stunts has to walk the fine line of believability, or else you feel you’re watching a cartoon with no stakes.
pretty sure it was the bridge jump in the opening race sequence of second one that set the tone of: this is no longer a reality based movie series, accept the implausible and have some fun.in other moments of that film they abandoned reality pretty hard. while everyone enjoys a good ejecto seato, that was a bit outside of reality. never mind the computer scrambling helicopter shooting thingys.
It’s amazing how unexciting they manage to make all this spectacle. A car doing a flip and exploding should never be boring, but in these movies it somehow always is.