The Fast and the Curious Chapter Eight: 2019's The Fate of the Furious is a Deliriously Over the Top Delight

I am a hardcore fan of these movies at this point.

Fun fact: it’s also a movie! 

When I wrote up 2017’s The Fate of the Furious during the first year of my website Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place’s existence I was not a fan. I don’t remember a lot of my reviews but back then I was VERY snooty and very full of myself and would compare every film to Citizen Kane and find it lacking. This applied to all genre movies as well. If I remember correctly, my primary criticism of Green Lantern, for example, was that its screenplay lacked the emotional power of Herman Mankiewicz and Orson Welles’ acclaimed script for the 1941 classic and its cinematography wasn’t as groundbreaking as Gregg Toland’s work on Citizen Kane. 

I thoroughly dug it this time around however. What changed? Well, sometime around 2021 I stopped comparing every movie unfavorably to Citizen Kane. I realized that it wasn’t fair to films, filmmakers or moviegoers. 

Instead of judging every movie harshly because it is not better than a popular choice for the greatest movie of all time I began to appreciate movies for what they are rather than despising them for what they are not: namely, as good, or better, than Citizen Kane. 

This time around I thoroughly dug Fate of the Furious for what it is: an aggressively multi-cultural, globe-hopping spectacle that sets out to be the biggest, craziest and most wildly melodramatic Fast & Furious movie ever and succeeds. 

Is it the best Fast & Furious movie? I would say not. I think Fast and Furious 7 earns that distinction though Fate of the Furious is in the same ballpark in terms of quality, size and sheer lunacy. 

I knew that Fate of the Furious did well. I did not realize just how well it did. How well did the seventh sequel to a modest drag racing crime movie do? According to Wikipedia, Fate of the Furious is the eleventh top-grossing film of ALL TIME. 

That means that in the century-plus history of film only ten movies have made more at the box-office than this spectacularly silly exercise in comically over-the-top machismo.

That is very good. The Fate of the Furious opens in Cuba with a deeply satisfying set-piece where Dom races a hotshot with the fastest, sexiest car on the island while Dom is stuck with what appears to be the slowest, worst car in North America. 

There is a method to Dom’s madness, however. He turns the lemon into a nitro-fueled beast that bursts into flaming as they approach the finish line. Dom wins the race by driving backwards then leaping out of the clunker when it plummets into the ocean but rather than accept his competitor’s car as a reward for winning the race he accepts something far more important to him: his respect. 

It’s the franchise in a nutshell: exotic locations, spectacular car stunts and lots of macho emotion related to family and honor. 

It’s also one of the final times the movie allows Dom to be not just a good guy, but pretty much the best dude ever. 

In Cuba Dom is approached by Cipher (Charlize Theron), the world’s greatest hacker with a proposition he can’t refuse: do her evil bidding or she will murder his baby boy and the mother of his only child. 

Theron embraces mustache-twirling outsized villainy in an enjoyably hammy star turn rich with lovingly delivered monologues. “You’re going to work for me. You’re gonna betray your brothers, abandon your code and shatter your family!” Cipher informs Dom with an excess of malevolent glee.

Dom is known for his oft-stated love of family within the universe of Fast & Furious as he is in our world. It’s a trope it returns to again and again, in myriad forms. 

The Fate of the Furious is, predictably, all about family. After the crowd-pleasing opening there's a lovely scene of Dwayne Johnson’s hard-ass Hobbs coaching his daughter’s soccer team with the same fury and single-minded intensity he applies to hunting down the world's bad guys. He leads the girls in a Maori dance and chant that embodies the series’ admirable commitment to showcasing other cultures and countries. 

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that one of the reasons these movies do huge business internationally is because they take place all over the world and feature actors from all over the globe. That may make them more appealing to worldwide audiences than movies about Americans with predominantly white casts. 

Needless to say, Dom is NOT happy that he is being forced to choose between his biological family and his surrogate family of world-saving speed demons. But he goes along with it anyway. 

Throughout the film Diesel sports a vaguely constipated expression that silently but unmistakably conveys, "I don’t want to do all of these horrible things but a master hacker who looks like a supermodel is forcing me to do them. I’m so sorry. This really isn’t me at all. I'm more of a family guy” and more succinctly, "I am so sorry.” 

In The Fate of the Furious Dom has essentially become Superman, an all-powerful being who represents everything about good our country and Johnson is now the Incredible Hulk. 

Johnson’s massive muscles look like they're about to burst through the skintight shirts he favors. He’s not just strong and muscular. He is a goddamn beast. He is hulk. He is a monster who throws grown men around like they’re rag dolls. 

He’s the straightest of straight arrows but he nevertheless ends up in the slammer for a crime he did not commit, where his cell directly faces that of Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham), the primary villain in The Fast and the Furious 7 and the brother of The Fast and the Furious 6’s head bad guy.  

These extremely large alpha males taunt each other and threaten one another in a manner that unmistakably recalls flirting. Hobbs and Shaw forever seem to be on the verge of exchanging fisticuffs or making out. 

The Fate of the Furious retains the raging homoeroticism at the film’s core. If I might give the film the highest possible praise, Statham and Johnson are like a 2017 version of Tango & Cash. 

Give these men a spin-off! Oh wait, they did. I will be covering that as my eleventh film in this series despite it being puzzlingly unpopular. I get as many views for Joy of Positivity pieces and those require way less work and effort. But I’m stubbornly persisting all the same because I am nothing if not obsessive. 

It’s Dom versus the family, which now includes Deckard Shaw because this franchise simply cannot have enough outsized bruisers in its cast. 

The Fate of the Furious swaggers confidently from one impressive set-piece to another, like a jailbreak where Hobbs and Shaw bring the pain to convicts and guards alike and a scene where Statham dispatches with a small army of bad guys on Cipher’s plane while toting around Dom’s baby boy. 

In moments like these The Fate of the Furious shoots wildly for a sort of gonzo blockbuster John Woo. Excess is the whole point. It’s the Fast and the Furious after all, not the slow and milquetoast. 

Part of that epic bigness involves topping previous entries in terms of scope and audacity. At its most agreeable bonkers, The Fate of the Furious has Dom ride a car over a submarine. 

In perhaps my favorite scene Cipher uses her hacking genius to control automobiles from a distance and sends a bevy of cars plunging from a third story window to the merciless concrete in a wild set-piece that recalls the only good scene in The Happening but with cars. 

If this scene looks authentic that might be because they actually used real cars instead of CGI. That’s what you can do with a two hundred and seventy five million dollar budget. 

Incidentally The Fate of the Furious is the top-grossing film directed by an African-American. F. Gary Gray broke his own record for Straight Outta Compton by approaching a BILLION dollars. Is it the best movie directed by an African-American? I would say no but it’s a lot of fun and genuinely good in my increasingly lenient estimation. 

We’ve got cars aplenty but also a motherfucking submarine and a remote control tank. It’s tremendously satisfying but also too much of a good thing. It’s the kind of excessive epic where you think it’s nearing the end and then discover you’ve got a half hour left to go. 

Does The Fate of the Furious need to be one hundred and thirty six minutes? It does not but I was never bored and often engaged. 

Within the Fast & Furious universe Paul Walker’s character Brian O’Conner is still alive. He’s just chosen to focus on family life and is, of course, never seen. In a world of deep fakes and AI, I am profoundly grateful for that. 

The Fate of the Furious ends with the requisite celebratory family barbecue and sentimental toast to mi familia. When Dom tells the family that he has named his baby boy Brian they are all deeply moved by the gesture. 

Of course it doesn’t really make sense that they’d get choked up thinking about their very alive friend that they apparently never see. It only makes sense as a tribute to a dead friend. 

In that respect The Fate of the Furious gets to have it both ways. It doesn’t have to deal with the stone cold bummer of a beloved character’s death yet the film still finds ways to mourn Walker and pay homage all the same. 

Like so much of the film’s talk about family and loyalty and living by a code it’s cheesy as hell and unapologetic in its sentimentality but also strangely moving. 

The Fate of the Furious, one of the most expensive movies ever made as well as one of the highest-grossing, subscribes to the popular notion that if bigger is better than biggest is best. 

That extends to the flagrant sentimentality, which at this point is just as important to the ongoing saga as fast cars, large men and tough, sexy women. 

Is The Fate of the Furious as good or better than Citizen Kane? Surprisingly, I’m going to say yes. It made WAY more money and feature way more jacked dudes on steroids. Also, I don’t recall Citizen Lame having even a single scene where a dude rides a car over a submarine. 

We only have three movies left (Fast 9, Fast 10 and Hobbs and Shaw) but I am digging this ride and already feeling a little melancholy about it ending in the not too distant future.