With the Fast & Furious movie franchise’s astronomical rise to becoming the biggest action series of all time, it’s easy to forget how much of a vast departure it is from the very original movie. The Fast and the Furious is very much a grounded crime movie with some everyday characters, small-time opportunist crooks, and an aesthetically pleasing backdrop of street racing.
This is a far cry from the upcoming Fast & Furious 9, a globetrotting adventure with end-of-the-world consequences. With what some feel is the schlocky CGI excess of the recent movies, it brings into question if there should have ever been any sequels at all, but there are arguments for both cases.
Standalone: It’s Realistic
The Fast & Furious series is now known for, more than anything, its insane, high-octane action. Between jumping from one skyscraper to another in a supercar and driving vehicles out of an airplane mid-flight, the series is in a oneupmanship competition against itself. However, before this happened, people forget that the original movie was very much grounded in reality, as it simply follows an undercover FBI agent trying to infiltrate a gang of criminals.
It’s extremely hard to believe that both The Fast and the Furious, a movie about some meatheads slinging stolen DVD players, is in the same universe as Fate of the Furious, a movie that sees those same meatheads blow up a submarine.
Series: Departure From Street Racing
If there were eight movies all about street racing, it would have gotten old by now, as many fans felt it was already starting to feel forced by Tokyo Drift.
But the street racing plot of the original was very of its time, as it tackled a very niche fad, so the slow move to the action genre, as occurred in incremental steps with each movie since the fourth entry, is the best thing that could have been done with the property. However, racing is still one of the things fans want and it's still imperative to the series and where it all started.
Standalone: The Stakes Are High
With the sequels, the protagonists have become so powerful, over time, that they are all but superheroes at this point, and there’s no better example of this than in Hobbs & Shaw, in which the bad guy is literally a supervillain with legitimate superpowers.
So whenever something dramatic happens, many fans feel there are no stakes, as audiences know that Dom can jump out of a car, glide through the air, and land on a truck, 50 feet away. Not to mention that people have come back from the dead on several occasions by this point.
Series: The Ever-Expanding Cast
The cast has been growing and growing ever since the original, and there are some fan-favorite characters that weren’t in the first movie.
If it wasn’t for 2 Fast 2 Furious, there would be no Rome or Tej, both of whom deserve their own spin-off series, and if it wasn’t for Tokyo Drift, there’d by no Han or even Sean, who is set to finally make a proper return to the series with Fast & Furious 9. The series wouldn’t be the same if it wasn’t for the characters that were introduced after the original.
Standalone: It’s A Great Point Break Remake
With Point Break being about an FBI agent going undercover and taking part in an extreme sport, in this case, surfing, to force his way into a tight-knit group of criminals, The Fast and the Furious is similar to the 90s movie in so many ways that it’s impossible to ignore.
But that’s not necessarily a bad thing, as there are some ways in which Point Break has aged poorly that Furious has improved upon. The street racing aspect is much more exciting than surfing too, not to mention it’s much better than the 2015 remake of the former.
Series: The Running Gags
Tej is the most intelligent of the group and has become a surveillance genius that rivals iconic movie surveillance specialists, such as Harry from The Conversation and Bobby from Enemy of the State. Given the fact that Tej was just a mechanic taking cuts off the top of illegal street races in 2 Fast 2 Furious, the character development is hilarious, and the series is very self-aware of this, making a joke of it in every movie.
There are other running gags too, as the whole “family” concept becomes more of a joke with each consecutive release, as does the Corona product placement, as Mr. Nobody literally slams a whole bucket of Corona on the table to entice Dom to work with him.
Standalone: It’s All About Dom & Brian
Throughout the first movie, Dom got more jaded and worn down, and it wasn’t just because of the high stakes. When Dom finds out that Brian is an undercover cop, the anti-hero genuinely feels betrayed, as the whole of the two-hour movie was spent with these two characters.
There’s genuine heart and emotion at the core of the movie, all because of the bond that was built between the two main characters, and it’s one of the best on-screen bromances.
Series: Diversity
The Fast and the Furious would look a lot different if it was recast today, but with the series continuously adding to the roster of genius superheroes, the franchise has always been forward-thinking when it comes to its casting.
Going as far back as the very first movie, the Fast & Furious series was casting Korean, African-American, Israeli, and Brazilian actors as the lead characters, and that was way before other studios started patting themselves on the back for doing the same thing, which wouldn’t be until more than a decade later.
Standalone: The Aesthetic
The Fast and the Furious is one of the coolest movies of the 21st century. Street racing was still a very underground scene at the time, and it was a concept that most people wouldn’t be able to grasp if they were told about it in general conversation. Car fanatics souping up street cars and sticking neon lights under them was another language to the general audience.
But the first movie popularized the movement, influenced a ton of racers, and there are thousands of men who watched this when they were 12 years old that are now surely mechanics.
Series: How Far Will The Series Go?
As each movie features even bigger stunts, or at least CGI madness, it begs the question: what can possibly come next? With Fast Five featuring Dom and Brian destroying Rio with a giant bank vault, Furious 7 featuring the skyscraper jump, and Fate of the Furious featuring the submarine scene, each consecutive movie has an equally increasing budget and outlandish plot.
People love to speculate where it could go next, with some saying that audiences could see the gang go to space, and maybe even time travel.