Introducing The Fast and the Curious, an Epic Journey Through the Entire Fast & Furious Franchise. First up: 2001's The Fast and the Furious

I'm gonna watch and write about all ten entries in The Fast and the Furious series AND Hobbs & Shaw and you're going to be riding shotgun the whole time! FAMILY!

Welcome, friends, to the very first entry in The Fast and the Curious. It’s a column where I will watch and write about all eleven entries in the Fast and Furious franchise: the ten films in the series as well as the 2019 spin-off The Fast and the Furious Presents: Hobbs and Shaw. It’s a decidedly pragmatic endeavor inspired by my desire to get twelve articles out of my eleven-movie The Fast and the Furious binge instead of just one. 

I’m going to be spending something like TWENTY FOUR HOURS immersing myself in the exquisite stupidity of the blockbuster franchise for an upcoming piece for Fatherly. I want to get as much out of the experience as possible. 

From the vantage point of 2023 and Fast X, which I have not seen yet but I hear is VERY silly, 2001’s The Fast and the Furious is a Bicycle Thieves-like masterpiece of deeply humane Neo-realism compared to its sequels. 

In The Fast and the Furious, Vin Diesel is positively Lilliputian compared to the Incredible Hulk-like monstrosity he has become. It’s like how Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds were large, powerful men as rookies but also recognizably and unmistakably human. Then the steroids hit and they became Godzilla-sized monstrosities who could seemingly devour their old bodies in one gulp and then eat a plate of Testosterone for dessert. 

Diesel followed a similar arc. It’s downright jarring seeing him not only look but also act like a human being here. It’s also weird seeing him act and give a genuine performance instead of just guzzling Coronas and mumbling in that gravel rasp of his about the importance of family. 

Once upon a time The Fast and the Furious was just a movie. It wasn’t a franchise. It wasn’t a series of memes. It wasn’t the source of a weird public beef between towering man-beasts. It wasn’t even that big of a movie, just an entertaining gearhead melodrama set in the sleazily compelling world of Los Angeles’ underground street racing scene. 

The halo that has hovered over Paul Walker’s sainted image since he died young and dramatically and in a manner spookily connected to the franchise he will be fondly remembered for makes it feel churlish and mean-spirited to point out that he wasn’t very good at acting, which was his profession. 

The only real problem with Paul Walker’s performance here is that he’s not convincing as a hotshot drag racer, or as a skilled undercover operative or as a skilled undercover operative who has convinced the entire criminal underworld that he’s a hotshot drag racer. 

It’s Rule, baby!

Also, every time Vin Diesel is offscreen you wonder what he’s up to. Diesel undoubtedly loved Walker and considered him not just a coworker or costar but a brother—one might even say they were “family”—but he also probably appreciated that Walker makes him look like a cross between Marlon Brando and Laurence Olivier here. 

When I first saw The Fast and the Furious I saw Walker as a handsome blank, a dreamy charisma vacuum in the lead role of Brian O’Conner. Walker’s blonde hero is an Los Angeles police officer who goes undercover as a hotshot drag racer as a way of getting close to daredevil car nut Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel). 

The handsome young man with the winning smile and the ingratiating air of All-American boyishness also wants to get closer to Dominic’s sister Mia (Jordanna Brewster) so that they can go on a kissing date, hold hands, make out and eventually get married and make a baby. 

This handsome young man’s interest in Mia doesn’t escape the attention of Dom’s crew. When Leon (Johnny Strong), a hotheaded member of Dom’s family sees Brian chatting up Mia while ordering a tuna sandwich he utters the immortal and unforgivable dialogue, "What's up with this fool? What is he, sandwich crazy?” 

Brian may or may not be a sandwich-crazy fool but he’s really crazy about Mia and her tight low-rise jeans. It’s telling that The Fast and the Furious is an exploitation movie about the dangerous, sexy, multi-cultural world of underground drag racing and its central romance is the chaste bond between a man who wouldn’t look out of place on a Nazi recruitment poster and a cute girl he wants to smooch. 

The other big romance in The Fast and the Furious, beyond, of course, Dom and Brian’s deeply sublimated sexual desire for one another, is between Dom and Letty Ortiz, who Michelle Rodriguez plays as a rage-filled badass more than capable of humiliating manly men with her fists and her driving ability.

In a line I really hope wouldn’t make it into the movie if it were made today, Mia tells Brian that Letty got addicted to cars and became obsessed with Dom when she was ten years old. On the very day Letty turned sixteen, meanwhile, Dom suddenly developed an interest in the MUCH YOUNGER woman that went above and beyond being willing to help her pass her driver’s test.

SIXTEEN! We’re supposed to be impressed by Dom’s willpower because he was willing to wait until Letty reached the age of consent before having a sexual relationship with her. 

In a possibly related, yucky development, Paul Walker’s final girlfriend, Jasmine Pilchard Gosnell, was only sixteen when she started dating the then-33 year old movie star. 

It’s a testament to the feisty feminist fury that Michelle Rodriguez brings to the role that The Fast and the Furious’ big old age difference only feels moderately creepy and not absolutely disgusting. 

I suspect that part of the reason The Fast and the Furious franchise became a multi-billion dollar pop culture phenomena is because it invites audiences to enter an unapologetically, unashamedly hyper-masculine realm of  muscle-bound dudes, sexy babes, T&A, fast cars and daring deeds that’s also a world where men express their feelings openly and are not afraid to love each other like family. 

Brian wins Dom’s respect by sheltering him from the police. He joins Dom’s crew and begins working with him on a big drag-racing event called RACE WARS.

That’s right: race wars. That might seem confusing, or even problematic until you realize that the Race Wars pit racers of different ethnicities against each other in an all-out battle for dominance. 

The Fast and the Furious does not reveal that Brian is an undercover agent until well over a half hour in but Walker is such a bland performer that the revelation barely registers. OF COURSE he’s a fucking cop. He’s Paul Walker. He basically only played cops and high school athletes whose brain and consciousness are put inside a mechanical dinosaur. 

It’s MURDA!!!!!

At a certain point, The Fast and the Furious franchise didn’t just use CGI to make cars do things they could never do in real life, or even in the fevered imaginations of young boys: it also used CGI to yank Paul Walker back from heaven.

The Fast and the Furious, however, possesses a grit and a level of verisimilitude the franchise would never recapture. There’s an element of danger and stakes that would be lost once Dom becomes Superman and his family become the Mission Impossible team. 

Like Dom, The Fast and the Furious lives a quarter mile at a time. It exists forever in the moment, in that adrenaline-pumping split second when it all goes down. 

This series became such a boy’s fantasy that it’s easy to forget that The Fast and the Furious is ostensibly based on a true story, namely an article about drag-racing called “Racer X” that appeared originally in Vibe.  

The Fast and the Furious franchise decided that if it was goin to compete with the Mission Impossible and James Bond franchises then it would really need to up its game in terms of gizmos, sexy babes, cool vehicles and crazed spectacle. 

They would need to become everything to every-bro but it was once a nifty little b-movie rich in moral ambiguity as well as high-octane thrills and blessed with a superstar-making turn from Vin Diesel. 

Diesel would be reduced to macho self-parody as he got more and more diesel and jacked but he is astonishingly convincing here as a dude with a lot of problems but also a lot of integrity. 

I’m excited to embark on this adventure with you! Because I am LITERALLY insane I’m not just going to watch or rewatching all ten The Fast and the Furious movies; I’m also going to watch the spin-off Fast and Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw. 

Every journey begins with a single step, or in this case, the first quarter mile. 

This is gonna be fun! That’s the Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas promise! 

And for the love of God, would it kill you to become a paid subscriber? To me, paid subscribers aren’t just cherished and much appreciated cyber-benefactors: they’re FAMILY and you know how important that is.