Big Daddy Dom Returned for 2009's Back to Basics Fast & Furious

It's a family reunion...of family!

The problem with turning yourself into a lucrative joke is that you can’t complain when people start laughing at you. Vin Diesel has been a meme and a punchline for a good decade and a half now. 

Vin Diesel is the undershirt-clad, Corona-swilling, family-extolling face of cornball American masculinity. Once upon a time, however, he was just an actor who played different roles. 

Then Diesel triumphantly returned to The Fast and the Furious franchise with 2009’s Fast and Furious, which he also produced. In the ensuing fifteen years Diesel has played a talking, anthropomorphic tree in 2014’s Guardians of the Galaxy, 2017’s The Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, 2018’s Ralph Breaks the Internet, 2019’s Avengers: Endgame, 20122’s Thor: Love and Thunder and 2023’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. 

In that time he also played space hero Riddick in 2013’s Riddick and Dominic Toretto in the 2009 short film Bandoleers, 2013’s Fast Five, 2013’s Fast & Furious 6, 2015’s Furious 7, 2017’s The Fate of the Furious, 2021’s F9, 2023’s Fast X. Oh, and Diesel also reprised the role of Red Bull Axe Body Spray James Bond in 2017’s XXX: Return of Xander Cage. 

The only time Diesel has played characters other than Dominic Toretto, Groot, Riddick or Xander Cage was in 2016’s Billy Lynn’s Halftime Walk, where he played “Shroom” and 2020’s Bloodshot. 

Neither film was original. Billy Lynn’s Halftime Walk was based on a novel while Bloodshot once again playing a superhero from a comic book. But they were certainly more original than seeing Diesel play or voice the characters that he has made famous and that in turn have made him not just a big international movie star but an outsized caricature of a macho action hero. 

Diesel has achieved the enviable level of fame where he no longer needs to do anything different or new when he can just play the same iconic characters over and over again for giant paydays and massive international fame. 

Nice work if you can get it! The price, of course, is that Diesel isn’t really an actor anymore. He can’t be. Diesel has got an organization to support, drivers, assistants, agents, managers, massage therapists, professional blunt rollers, personal astrologists, vibe controllers, shadowy spiritual advisers, the ghost of Dr. Eugene Landy and the like. 

All of those people need money and Diesel isn’t going to make that kind of moolah making scale playing an autistic man who raises pigeon in a Sundance movie. No, you’re going to maintain that crazy level of fame and success by doing what has already been spectacularly successful, like playing tough yet tender hood with a heart of gold Dominic Toretto in a Fast and the Furious movie. 

Diesel and Dom are back where they belong and doing what they do best in 2009’s Fast & Furious. The franchise wandered aimlessly in the wilderness for two sequels Diesel chose not to star in for reasons of varying legitimacy. 

With Fast & Furious it started feeling like its old self again. This very purposefully feels like an actual sequel to The Fast and the Furious instead of a movie that takes place within the same universe but with different characters and settings, the way 2 Fast, 2 Furious and Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift did. 

Fast & Furious opens with Dom still a fugitive following the events of The Fast and the Furious. He pulls off a daring heist with a crew that includes Han from Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift but learns that the fuzz are on his trail. 

Han leaves the proceedings early, right after saying that he hears the Tokyo scene is some wild, wild stuff, just really, really out there, man. He doesn’t turn to the camera and wink knowingly but the effect is the same. One might even say that he drifts all the way to Tokyo while remaining both fast and furious. 

This leads Dom to temporarily break up the family but when he learns that his soulmate Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) has been killed he has no choice but to re-enter the dangerous, glamorous worlds of street racing to bring down Arturo Braga (John Ortiz), the ruthless drug kingpin responsible for her demise. 

This brings him back into the orbit of Paul Walker’s Brian O’Conner, who is also working on bringing down the feared drug dealer. Walker benefits from Diesel’s return more than anybody. 

Diesel and Walker were famously very close friends offscreen. This is going to sound crazy and I apologize in advance if you read it and think that I’ve lost my mind and try to have me committed to a mental hospital against my will. Hey, it’s happened before. It wasn’t great but I survived it. 

So you will have to excuse me if this sounds nutty but in Fast & Furious as well as the films that follow it’s almost as if they’re not just coworkers but surrogate brothers, “family” even. 

Does that make sense? Don’t come after me with the butterfly nets! I’m just saying what everyone else is thinking but is afraid to say, like FOX’s Greg Gutfeld!

Since Walker died young and dramatically and was supposed to be a nice guy I feel bad criticizing him but the truth is that I was not a Walker fan before his passing. That has not changed since his death. 

Diesel makes Walker better, but not by that much. Brian isn’t much of a role. He’s a generic cop hunk played by an actor who was handsome and likable but didn’t bring a whole lot to the table beyond good looks, likability and famously good chemistry with the much more charismatic and talented actor whose legacy he will always be synonymous with. 

I’m talking about Vin Diesel. I’m not sure if I was making that clear but Walker needed Diesel in a way that Diesel does not need Walker. That’s because Diesel is an innately more magnetic and compelling performer than Walker but also because by the time Walker headed to the big highway in the sky the Fast and the Furious family had grown to include pretty much everybody and everything. 

You’re less likely to notice the absence of an actor like Walker when I dunno, ACADEMY AWARD WINNING THESPIANS HELEN MIRREN AND CHARLIZE THERON ARE ADDED TO THE FRANCHISE. I’m just going to say it now: Helen Mirren is better at acting than Paul Walker. 

Mirren and Theron aren’t the only ostentatious distaff additions to the Fast and the Furious family. Fast & Furious introduces a pre-Wonder Woman Gal Gadot to the series as Gisele Yashar, Arturo Braga’s right hand woman. 

Early in Fast and Furious Vin Diesel and Gal Gadot are called upon to flirt and it’s so painfully awkward that it damn near gave me hives. It’s the one scene in the film where Diesel’s performance rings false.

For all of his machismo and muscles, Diesel is a fundamentally asexual figure. That’s why he can go on and on about family and not have it seem creepy. 

He’s not supposed to have good chemistry with Gadot’s character, WHOSE SEXUAL ADVANCES HE VERY REALISTICALLY REJECTS but it shouldn’t make everybody in the audience feel deeply uncomfortable either. 

Dom, being a good guy master criminal, only has eyes for his beloved Letty, and perhaps infers that in the crazy Fast and the Furious universe family AND love are both stronger than death. Death isn’t strong at all. People are CONSTANTLY coming back from it, including Letty, Han AND Gisele. That’s a daytime soap opera level of resurrections. 

Fast & Furious is a surprisingly straightforward endeavor that eschews the James Bond/Mission Impossible bigness for a relatively stripped-down b-movie about adrenaline junkies chasing vengeance in the L.A criminal underworld. 

Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift director Justin Lin returns for a decidedly different follow-up that deliberately eschews the camp and cheese of the previous two entries in a way that makes it objectively better than 2 Fast 2 Furious and Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift but also less fun. 

This takes itself seriously in a way subsequent entries would not in a way that is fundamentally satisfying but also leaves plenty of room for the crazed excess of what is to come. 

Like, oh I dunno, THE ROCK. 

The Rock is coming people! This is not a drill! This changes EVERYTHING and yet strangely nothing at all at the same time.