Why is the Fast & Furious franchise so popular?
THE TENTH instalment in the Fast & Furious series is released, almost to the day, on the 20th anniversary of the first. In Britain the film is called Fast & Furious 9, and in America it has the snazzier title of F9: The Fast Saga, because one entry, Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw, is counted as a spin-off rather than a direct sequel. However you do the arithmetic, these absurdly macho, petrolheaded guilty pleasures add up to one of Hollywoods most remarkable success stories. Fast & Furious films now come out more regularly than James Bond or Mission: Impossible ones, but they match them in scaleand beat them in box-office takings. An unusual feature is that they are not adapted from a comic or an old television seriesa claim which could be made for numerous blockbusters in the 1980s and 1990s, but for hardly any since then. The franchise got into gear in 2001 with The Fast and the Furious, a relatively gritty, small-scale thriller about an undercover LAPD detective (Paul Walker) who infiltrates a gang of illegal street racers led by a gruff alpha male, Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel). (Jordana Brewster and Michelle Rodriguez had little to do as the mens love interests.) Mr Diesel declined to appear in the sequel, 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003), leaving the less charismatic Walker as the de facto star. Neither actor was in the third instalment, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006), until Mr Diesel turned up at the end for a smirking surprise cameo. It looked as if the franchise had coasted across the finish line without any petrol left in the tank. In fact, it was having a pit stop before roaring back onto the road. A fourth film, Fast & Furious (2009), reunited the stars of the first one, including Ms Rodriguez and Ms Brewster. It sold enough tickets to justify a further sequel, but the producers steered away from yet more stories of cops and hot-rodders. Fast & Furious 5 (2011) was an international heist movie, and from then on, the films budgets and profits rose each time, while their plausibility veered in the opposite direction. The erstwhile gang of small-time crooks became an elite team of indestructible, globe-trotting mercenaries who battled cyberterrorists and raced submarines: in Fast & Furious 9 two characters drive a rocket-fuelled car into space. The plots were no longer borrowed from police procedurals but from spy capers and superhero epics. The cast, which initially had no A-list actors, soon included such stellar guests as Dwayne Johnson, Helen Mirren, Charlize Theron and Kurt Russell. Not even the death of Walker, the first films leading man, could slow down the Fast & Furious franchise. The horrific irony is that Walker was killed in a car crash in 2013 while in the passenger seat of a Porsche Carrera that was being driven through Los Angeles at illegal speeds. Given that the series raison detre is to glamourise dangerous driving in expensive cars, it could and perhaps should have ended there and then. Instead, the producers continued with the film they were shooting, Furious 7. They used the footage of Walker they already had, added some scenes in which his brothers doubled for him, and packaged the film as a tear-jerking tribute to the actor. Furious 7 (2015) went on to make more than $1.5bnmore than all but two of the Marvel superhero blockbusters. Like the James Bond movies, which have a crack at blaxploitation (Live and Let Die), science fiction (Moonraker) and whatever else is in vogue, the Fast & Furious series keeps being customised, but it always retains enough of the original chassis to feel familiar. The first films writer, Gary Scott Thompson, and director, Rob Cohen, havent been involved since then: most of the succeeding episodes were written by Chris Morgan and directed by Justin Lin. But, whoever is behind the wheel, fans know they can expect to see explosions, digitally-enhanced demolition derbies, bald action heroes with huge biceps, multi-racial casts (the series most enlightened component), and young women in bikinis standing around swimming pools (the series least enlightened component). Above all, fans can also expect to see Dominic Toretto, a dude in a tank top who saves the world by dodging missiles in his souped-up muscle car, but who also swigs Corona beers, wears a crucifix around his tree-trunk neck, and mutters about family while flipping burgers on his backyard barbecue. Maybe he is what gives the franchise its edge over James Bond and Mission: Impossible. Maybe todays average male cinema-goer no longer aspires to be a suave, sophisticated, cocktail-sipping secret agent. He aspires to be Dom. Fast & Furious 9, or F9, is screening in cinemas in America and Britain now