Category: Fast and the Furious movies

  • Hobbs & Shaw (2019, David Leitch)

    FAST AND THE FURIOUS spin-off staring franchise scene-stealers Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham; they’re an unlikely duo (Johnson’s ‘Murican good guy and Statham’s British super-assassin), which the movie uses for a lot of humor, but only provides so much mileage. Luckily Idris Elba’s the bad guy (giving a good performance in a silly movie) and…

  • The Fate of the Furious (2017, F. Gary Gray)

    What is the Fate of the Furious? It’s unclear screenwriter Chris Morgan knows–it comes up in the script a little–but it’s a needless portent. The Fate is the cast sitting around listening to Vin Diesel talk about family after they’ve gone through high action and zero character development. Just because they’re all millionaires after one…

  • Furious 7 (2015, James Wan)

    Furious 7 has some really bad CGI. And I’m not talking about the creepy Paul Walker head at the end (during the utterly out of place and terribly integrated memorial sequence). It’s everything. Director Wan doesn’t know how to shoot a single scene in Furious, not the action scenes, definitely not the car scenes, even…

  • Fast & Furious 6 (2013, Justin Lin), the extended version

    For the most part, Fast & Furious 6 is a delightfully absurd action concoction from director Lin. The film drops the Fast and the Furious “family” into a James Bond movie; thank goodness, because it’s hard to imagine Roger Moore able to outdrive the bad guys here. And it’s even set in London (and later…

  • Fast Five (2011, Justin Lin), the extended version

    It’s almost embarrassing how well Fast Five is made. Director Lin can’t do two things–which might be important for the film if the story mattered at all–he can’t direct heist sequences and he can’t direct car races. He doesn’t care how the heist works or how the car race works, he cares about the scene…

  • Fast & Furious (2009, Justin Lin)

    With Fast & Furious, director Lin and screenwriter Chris Morgan do something incredible. They take what, a decade before would have been at best a video game spin-off (maybe featuring the original, now down in their career cast's voices), and make an energetically mercenary movie out of it. The film's ludicrous at almost every turn,…

  • Los Bandoleros (2009, Vin Diesel)

    The strange part of Los Bandoleros isn’t how it ends lame–it’s how well it starts. Sure, there’s this dumb story about how Vin Diesel, on the lamb in the Dominican Republic, has become a Robin Hood to the local people. Oh, right, forgot–It’s a Fast and the Furious vanity short “film” from Diesel. Undoubtedly something…

  • The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006, Justin Lin)

    Identifying the most interesting thing about The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift isn’t difficult. There’s so very little interesting about the film at all, anything slightly interesting becomes rather vibrant and engaging. Unfortunately, it’s the really weird treatment of girls in the film. Not women, but high school-aged girls. They are either mercenary or…

  • 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003, John Singleton)

    At some early point during 2 Fast 2 Furious–probably soon after the first car race, it becomes clear the film has two major influences for director Singleton. First, Star Wars. The car races often feel like Singleton is shooting an X-Wing sequence. Second, dumb white cop/black cop eighties movies. In this one, Paul Walker is…

  • Turbo Charged (2003, Philip G. Atwell)

    With the exception of being a Hollywood production (even if it’s a Hollywood production for video), Turbo Charged plays like an amateurish short movie make on an iMac. The kind of thing iMovie was great for back in the late nineties–lots of imaginative transitions, the omnipresent music so there doesn’t need to be any dialogue…

  • The Fast and the Furious (2001, Rob Cohen)

    An undercover cop (Paul Walker) finds himself drawn into a criminal underworld with a charismatic leader (Vin Diesel)! There’s not much original about The Fast and the Furious. What the screenwriters don’t lift out of Point Break, there’s director Cohen grabbing car chase related moments out of Lethal Weapon 3 and so on. Well, Cohen…