Looking Back: A Fast and Furious Retrospective

a look back at the most successful movie franchise in Hollywood history

by Dr. R. J. Scibbe

Wow. Thirty years. It seems like only yesterday car crashes overtook heart disease as the number one killer in America, and the Big 3 stopped production on all models of SUV and pickup truck to focus almost exclusively on sports cars. It’s been a decade since the Lobby for Speed as an Inalienable Right successfully abolished speed limits across the nation, eight years since drag racing overtook football as the most popular spectator sport, and six since NASCAR went belly up after losing 96% of its sponsorship.

Where does the time go?

You can’t name three people who haven’t seen one of the many Fast and Furious movies. If you can, let me be the first to thank you for all your selfless work with the blind. Let me also be the first to point out that every Fast and Furious film is now available for purchase on the Microsony Hypercard, allowing you to experience everything from the rush of wind to the smell of burned rubber right from your own living room. A technology, by the way, which Fast and Furious 3 is almost single-handedly credited for developing. “This isn’t a film that can be experienced with sight and sound alone,” said FaF3 director Hiresh Chhavvi in a 2020 interview. “We’re going to capture the true essense of  Fast and Furious. We’re going to give it to you in all five senses.” Everyone called him crazy, including me, as billions of dollars were poured into endless months of research on what many were convinced was an impossible science.

It wasn’t. Projection theaters went out of business practically overnight, and everything in the process of filmmaking from shooting to special effects to viewing was completely revolutionized forever. FaF3 made its investment back nearly three times over, and the Chhavvi estate is now one of the eight wealthiest in the world.

That wasn’t the first time a Fast and Furious film revolutionized the industry, of course, and here we sit on the brink of what everyone in America is calling “Fast and Furious 6”. Naturally, old stuff-shirt farts like me knows it’s not really part six. It’s actually part eleven or, if you want to be exceedingly technical (and when don’t I want to be exceedingly technical?) part thirteen. Most whippersnappers today started in on the series in 2018 when the reboot of the original took the country by storm, but they have at least a vague idea of the original 2001 action flick that started it all. What they don’t know is that even the 2001 “original” had its roots sewn way back in 1955.

The Fast and the Furious (1955) is a movie that nobody has seen. I’m not kidding. This flick grossed somewhere in the neighborhood of $18.50, and remember, this was back when movie tickets were only fifty cents each. A falsely convicted man breaks out of jail, steals a totally sweet sports car, takes a young woman hostage, and the two fall in love as they’re being chased by the cops. It’s impossible to fathom now how a movie at least tangentially related to fast cars could be a box office flop, but hey, back then we had just barely cured polio, let alone had any idea what a good film was. There was at least one studio who thought the premise was worth revisiting in a 1994 remake-in-everything-but-name called The Chase but nobody saw that either.

The Fast and the Furious (2001) is when people finally started to get their act together. They realized nobody cared about the characters or plot — they wanted to see fast sexy cars and they wanted a lot of them. I was fresh out of high schol at the time and had written it off as just another lame action flick, but the endless streams of moviegoers who patronized the ice cream shop where I worked eventually convinced me to take a look. I knew I had seen something special, and that my life would never be the same. I counted the seconds until the sequel.

2 Fast 2 Furious (2003) made me stop counting. Nearly the entire cast was dumped and though the races were technically more impressive, they just felt soulless. Why do we care about this stupid drug money subplot? When will people learn that rappers can’t act? How did they manage to screw up such a winning formula? Is this any way to properly name a sequel? I sighed wistfully while looking at the first movie’s DVD on my shelf, and my heart sank as I realized I had already bought the only movie in this series worth owning.

The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006) only earned a rental from me. Back then we actually had to wait for our movies to come in the mail before we could watch them (uphill both ways through the snow) and it was only a very dim passing curiousity that made me pick Tokyo Drift off the virtual shelf. It seemed to me the movie would be even further removed from what made the first one so amazing; absolutely no connection at all to the first two movies, none of the original cast returned, a focus on girly finesse and agility than manly breakneck speed… and what’s all this everyone’s saying about “ricers”? But hey, the film at least had enough sense to not be called “3 Fast 3 Furious” so why not give it a shot, right? I have to say I enjoyed the movie. But what I really enjoyed was the last ninety seconds, when Vin Diesel (not yet a presidential hopeful) showed up and made me leap from my seat and cheer with one simple promise: the next movie would be a return to form.

Fast & Furious (2009) turned out to be a disappointment. Who can say what it was? All the pieces were in place: the original cast was back, there were fast cars and cool explosions. It just lacked the raw, elemental pull of the first movie. No doubt I wasn’t the only one scratching my head about this; practically everyone was trying to figure out what, exactly, went wrong. The movie was fun to watch, don’t get me wrong, but I couldn’t help but feel there was a huge difference between a fast car movie you had to switch your brain off to enjoy and a fast car movie that tapped into that deep, subconscious part of your brain that doesn’t have a switch. The movie went on to be a commercial success, but it was nowhere near the runaway blockbuster sensation I was expecting the series to be after experiencing the bottled lightning of the original.

Even Faster and More Furiouser (2012) was, likewise, a waste of time. After years of setbacks and delays, supposed problems with stars Vin Diesel and Paul Walker, going through at least twelve scripts (one written by long-forgotten and almost criminally unfunny comedian Dane Cook), the film was released in only 1600 theaters and was essentially a hodgepodge of completely disconnected scenes with no coherency whatsoever. Now, of course,  EFMF is a cult classic along the lines of Plan Nine from Outer Space or Rocky Horror Picture Show, celebrated only for its horribleness and ripeness for self-parody. It’s most infamous foible, is that its slashed budget meant repeating footage of a high-speed crash in two completely separate scenes. Legendary film critic Roger Ebert famously died at a private showing, his last words being “I can’t believe I’m going to die watching this.” Even before hitting theaters it was widely joked that the film itself was so poor it was responsible for Ebert’s death. The final nail in the movie’s coffin was its only home release being on then-new and therefore ultra-expensive Microsoft VDF card, a $55 pill that was hard to swallow at a time everyone was either purchasing $25 Blu-rays or embracing digital distribution.

Then, for a while, nobody wanted to make a movie that was fast or furious. It seemed that particular meme had run its course; whatever impression the underworld of illegal street racing was going to make on the big screen… it had already made it. Microsoft got bought out by Sony. Scientology was banned. The Samuel L. Jackson trial overwhelmed cable news in a way that made O.J. Simpson jealous. President Obama shocked the country by naming Sarah Palin as his running mate. The world kept on spinnin’.

Until 2018. Enter unknown director Hiresh Chhavvi, his borderline unhealthy obsession with street racing, and his dream for a new kind of film: one that could be felt in addition to seen and heard.

Fast and Furious (2018) was just his springboard. Hollywood was just starting to come out of a two-decades-long love affair with remakes (and re-remakes, if 2017’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory can be believed), so it’s a small wonder this young upstart nobody actually managed to get his remake of some 2001 racing film green-lighted. Coincidentially, I was checking my e-mail and enjoying a sundae at a little ice cream restaurant when I first saw the trailer advertised. I decided to see it, just for old time’s sake.

It was, and remains, the most amazing film I had ever seen in my life. To this day it is still the only film I finished watching and then immediately went out to the box office to purchase another ticket. Whatever minor hold the 2001 movie had on me, this movie bit down ten times harder. Whatever deep-rooted spiritual desire I had to watch cars race, this movie tapped into it and then didn’t let up. It grabbed hold of everyone else, too, grossing over $400 million in its opening weekend and being the first film ever to top a worldwide gross of $2 billion and $3 billion — records that would not come within eyeshot of being broken for two years.

Fast and Furious 2 (2020) was everything its predecessor was and more. For the first time ever, a movie opened with absolutely no competition. Theaters across the nation ran FaF2 on every screen, starting a trend continued by every FaF since. It cleared its $218 million budget within the first six hours of showings. It was nominated for 17 Academy Awards and won 14, including Best Picture, Best Visual Effects, Best Director and Best Cinematography. Up to that point the movie series that had launched the most video games had been Star Wars at 87; FaF shattered that record within three years of FaF2‘s release. By this time Chhavvi had his own movie studio and essentially limitless funds to make whatever movies he damn well pleased. This is when we first started hearing murmurs about his futuristic and certainly impossible “five sense display”.

Late in 2020, Wayans Enterprises Inc. attempted to cash in on FaF with their pop culture comedy Fast Car Movie. They were shocked to find themselves sued by Chhavvi’s film studio, and quite honestly, so was the rest of the free world. Parody has long been recognized as fair use by pretty much every country developed enough to have a copyright law, but Chhavvi’s billions of dollars and sheer political clout proved too much for fairness and justice, and the rights to Fast Car Movie was handed over to the eccentric director. Freedom-loving Americans across the country, myself included, were outraged and threatened to boycott Chhavvi’s films, but who were we kidding? He had us all by the balls. In an even more shocking move, Chhavvi went on to actually film the movie, starring in and directing it himself. For the past decade Fast Car Movie has consistantly topped every critic’s list of funniest films and is the only movie inducted into the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry before opening day. Whetever crimes Chhavvi may have committed against freedom of speech, he managed to atone by publicly mocking of his own craft in the most hilarious and endearing way imaginable.

Flames of Fury: Fast and Furious 3 (2024) finished filming two full years behind the technology was available to properly display it. Chhavvi insisted the film could not be enjoyed without his patented “five sense display”, a new type of theater which would transmit smell, touch, taste and temperature to the audience. When bootlegs of the video and sound footage began to appear in 2023 Chhavvi founded a group of piracy watchdogs, the culmination of which eventually made piracy of virtual goods a more serious crime than burglary of actual goods. Surely everyone remembers the case of Tim and Brandon Stetson, convicted and sentenced to life without parole when a remote search of their hard drive revealed a not-yet-released FaF3 trailer.

While the government was busy shuffling digital file sharers off to internment camps and stomping all over everyone else’s civil rights at Chhavvi’s behest, theaters all over the country were being equipped with movement sensors, state-of-the-art heating and cooling systems, industrial fans and gyroscopic seats. For the first time in history people were paying more for a single movie ticket than they could for a home video release, all on the faith that FaF3 could deliver what it promised. It did. In spades. I was there at the premiere and the energy inside that theater was impenetrable. The casting of 57-year-old Vin Diesel as the film’s villain sparked a resurgence in the popularity of the original quadrilogy, packaged systems than on cars and houses combined. Chhavvi, even though he had only directed four films and been in the industry for six years, was graced with a well-deserved Lifetime Achievement Award. Work on the sequel began immediately.

Fast and 4ious (2028) wasn’t able to recapture the sheer thrill of its predecessor. Chhavvi was killed in the 2027 terrorist strike on Baghdad, leaving his oldest son Dominic to direct and leaving the rest of the world closer to nuclear annihilation than it had been since the middle of the 20th century. The first mistake Dom Chhavvi made was trying to give the film a retro feel by setting it in the late 90s and using a numbering convention possibly even more embarrassing than 2 Fast 2 Furious. His second mistake was involving sci-fi elements such as cloning and time travel in the plot, making the film even further removed from the main storyline than Fast Car Movie eight years before.

Dom’s downward spiral continued with his slapshod follow-up Extreme Ignition (2029) the very next year. Bucking the FaF title entirely and featuring a plot based on classic superheroes which fought crime with outlandish powers like laser eye beams and magic ice breath rather than more traditional means such as fast cars, insiders reported that Extreme Ignition was the movie Dom always wanted to make, but his father would never allow. The studio forced him to shoehorn the entire thing into the familiar street racing backdrop, and after ten years of dominating the film industry and American culture, it looked as though FaF‘s star might finally be on decline.

Fortunately for all of us, Dom has a little sister.

21-year-old Asha Chhavvi has vowed to bring her father’s vision back to the screen in next month’s Fast. Furious. Period., opening exactly thirty years to the day after the 2001 original. I’ve had the pleasure of an advance screening and, well, what can I say? Every other movie ever filmed has existed only to serve as a foothold for the long, arduous journey to this one. It is quite simply the pinnacle of human achievement. No work of art compares. It’ll have you racing back to see it again and again.

Who can say where American cinema is going to go in the next thirty years? Certainly not I; I am but a humble and snarky film critic. But if I had to put my money on it, I’d say street racing. Fast and Furious is here to stay, and if my last words end up being “I can’t believe I’m going to die watching this,” I will consider mine a life well-lived.