First Timer Reviews of the “Fast and Furious” Franchise Round 1: The Original Trilogy
First, An Explanation
Back in the middle of 2015 I was 12 years old. Even at 12, I knew better than to spend my hours watching the Fast & Furious franchise, but I thought it would be funny to make a silly vow to myself about it; being that the seventh film in the series was coming out (supposed at the time to be the final entry), I made a promise that if they ever got to ten movies, I would watch them all. I really didn’t believe it would happen back then. Even when the eighth film released two years later, I wasn’t worried. I didn’t count Hobbs and Shaw when it came out because I didn’t want to give Universal the benefit in the situation. Then, when the beautifully named F9 dropped in 2021, I started to get scared. It was still blowing up the box office. The testosterone machine didn’t seem to be stopping before it hit the mainline double-digits. Now, as I’m sure anybody that even slightly pays attention to cinema news knows, it’s made it. Fast X is here.
Now, as my friend Seth pointed out when I tricked him into watching most of them with me, I could’ve just forgotten about it. I could’ve let the eight-year-old promise to my twelve-year-old self stay in the past. But that’s just not how I do things.
If I’m honest, I was sort of excited to finally take part in this cultural phenomenon — before I started watching anyways. And now I feel like I have to write this series so I can at least make something of it.
Lap 1: The Fast and the Furious (2001)
The one that started it all, and the only one I’ve watched twice (I know, I know, I said “first timer…” I just rounded up! I watched it the first time many years ago (honestly might’ve been back when I thought about watching them at 12), and I didn’t like it. Now, I still don’t like it, but I can appreciate its appeal, especially at the time.
The most I can really say about this movie is it sets up both the good and the bad of the rest of the franchise. The fast cars, buff guys, bad dialogue, intense and unlikely-at-best action sequences, pointless tangents, glorified criminality, and more are presented here first, and they’re all compounded as the series goes on. Here, though, they’re all on their lowest setting, and it’s not too bad.
Best Part: The final heist scene, all the way through to the ending. It’s admittedly a pretty damn cool movie towards the end, and it’s reveal of the team as the heist criminals from the beginning of the movie is fun, I guess. It just takes a while to get there.
Worst Part: The convoluted storytelling. It’s harder than it should be to follow what’s going on, and it’s not because the story is that dense, it’s because there’s a lot of time spent on everything, even if it’s not very important to the plot.
Lap 2: 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003)
What a great example of early 2000s culture. The title. The moderately impressive CGI. The amount of times the characters say “man”, “bro”, or “cuz”. It’s about as indicative of the time period as you can get, for better, sure, but largely for worse.
Best Part: Jumping the Camaro onto the villains yacht. And I will admit, the playful banter between Roman and Brian is sometimes amusing and can even be pretty funny.
Worst Part: The cringiest dialogue I have ever heard in my life. Oh my god. It’s terrible. And I love the Star Wars prequels and spend hours watching low-budget horror, so I have a pretty high tolerance for it. While some of the lines are now inside jokes between my friends and I, they’re still unbelievably hard to hear while trying to keep a straight face.
Lap 3: The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006)
This is the oddball of the franchise, and, as with pretty much everything in the series, for better and worse. The setting is fun, the characters are good (Han is the absolute GOAT), and the yakuza’s part in the story was a cool spin on the L.A. criminal underground. Not a huge fan of Sean though, and not because of the actor but the character. He’s just not interesting to me, and the forced accent wasn’t something I loved hearing the entire movie.
Best Part: The final race down the mountain was actually really cool, and the stakes attached to it were honestly something I felt in this movie in a way that I didn’t for the previous ones. The stunt driving and cinematography come together really well, and the crowd cheering like crazy after the villain crashes to his assumed death is absolutely hilarious too.
Worst Part: The beginning of the movie. The cringy 2000s overload from the second entry in the series bleeds into the start of this one; the opening race and it’s circumstances are ridiculously silly and overdone, and the dialogue is still incredibly bad. Luckily, a lot of that clears up once Sean makes it to Tokyo.
Overall Thoughts: The Opening Trilogy
Overall, I can definitively call the first three films in the series often entertaining remnants of the early 2000’s. Personally, I’d rank Tokyo Drift as my favorite, closely followed by the original, with the second movie being easily the worst in my personal opinion. Credit where it’s due, the characters and their casting are great and probably the best part of this trilogy, along with the then-unseen race cinematography (some of it still pretty impressive to this day). Critique where it’s due, the dialogue is pretty insufferable all the way through, and many of the conventions started by the trilogy are much better left in the past.
