Fast and Furious - Stupendously Sincere Stupidity

This week marks the release of F9, the ninth film in the Fast and Furious franchise. This week also marks the week where I get back the final results to my English and Film Studies degree. Quite frankly, what better way is there to mark both momentous occasions than to celebrate the improbable miracle that is the Fast and Furious franchise. It's come a long way, sometimes a quarter mile at a time, sometimes a nuclear submarine at a time, but it has remained a series of total fascination to me. So using my knowledge and smarts, I want to analyse why Fast and Furious is so good, even to someone who has spent four years being told the good films look like the polar opposite of this. Pop open that bottle of Corona, chill with your family and join me as we go from the streets of L.A. to... well, that would be a spoiler, wouldn't it?

As any piece about the Fast and Furious franchise is obliged to say early on, this was originally a grounded franchise. The Fast and The Furious is pretty much a ripoff of Point Break, as a police officer named Brian O'Connor has to infiltrate a street racing group led by Dominic Toretto to find out who is stealing a bunch of CD players. While the plot is unrecognisably grounded though, there is a seriousness to the melodrama of character dynamics that does permeate through the entire franchise. The character drama is properly intense for no good reason at all, as the undercover cop falls in love with the sister of the racer he's trying to bust. Along the way, drag races are held (as in cars in a straight line, no wig work or extravagant makeup here) and there are action scenes. It is a really solid little film that has a grounded plot and only somewhat higher than average seriousness for an action film.

Which leads us onto 2 Fast 2 Furious, the best named film ever. Immediately, there is a jump in silliness, as we go to Miami and are now directly involved in drug running. The stunts are sillier, the characters are more comical with the introduction of both Tej and Roman, plus we're starting to build the world more. Where before it was street racing in LA, now we've left behind most of those characters for street racing in Miami. This trick is pulled again in The Fast and The Furious: Tokyo Drift, a film whose only returning character is a brief cameo from Dominic Toretto due to being set way over in Tokyo. There is still the street racing, there's some melodramatic deaths, but it once again feels grounded.

Do not expect the word "grounded" to come up again for any of the other films, as the rest of the franchise just blasts off. Fast and Furious marks the gang out as wanted by the U.S. Government, which is why they escape to Brazil in the excellent Fast 5. Their friendship with Luke Hobbs that stems from this film means that now they're brought in to do secret missions fighting a British crime gang in Fast and Furious 6, locating the world's most powerful tracking software in Furious 7 and then defeat a super criminal hacker who has stolen a nuclear submarine in The Fate of the Furious. Those plot points don't even mention the spin-off escapades seen in Fast and Furious Presents: Hobbs and Shaw in which two former villains team up to save the world, or the plot of F9, which I'm not going to go into detail on because it's still pretty recent.

Once you reach the latter half of the franchise, Fast and Furious gets to go big in ways that very few films do. It is utterly delicious. I'm a fan of the low-budget action schlock of people like Andy Sidaris or Sam Firstenberg, whose films are always tangibly pushing against their budgets. The aspirations are big but when your budget is this low, you settle for some nudity and maybe a handful of explosions. In a way, the Fast and Furious franchise feels to me like a natural extension of films like that, only with the budget tap on full blast. Want to go to Brazil? Sure. Feel like making two ramp cars to launch other cars off? Go for it. Interested in launching cars out of a car park just for the chaos of it? Quite frankly it's an insult you didn't ask sooner. There's a glee that this chaos is presented with, but it never feels like it is winking at you, or trying to be stupid in a self-aware way. The films genuinely think that these stunts are awesome and there is something infectious about how in love with the chaos they are.

And yet, even that isn't really what is so appealing to me. I love dumb action, of course I do, but the shell around it compels me too. The emotional dynamics of the relationships are also played for total sincerity, despite how ridiculous the action around them gets. As everyone who knows a lick about the Fast and Furious franchise knows, it's all about family. It's about brothers, sisters, sons and daughters, and the ways in which the world tries to test them. The core of the betrayal in The Fast and The Furious is that Mia and Dom thought that Brian was their brother. He has to work hard to earn their trust back (we don't really see this in action, but it takes three films, I'm giving the benefit of the doubt), at which point he is again family. Death, secret family members and fake deaths all try and throw spanners into the wheels of family, but these axles are stronger than that. Throw every soap opera trope at the crew (and I think we almost have), they will come out on top.

For me, and others have pointed this out so I can't claim total originality, the Fast and Furious films work under the definition of camp. There's an idea in Susan Sontag's essay which is pivotal to my understanding of the concept, where she differentiates between pure camp and intentional camp. She writes that "Pure Camp is always naïve. Camp which knows itself to be Camp ('camping') is usually less satisfying." (p13, Notes on Camp). It's not that I think the Fast and Furious franchise is necessarily camp, but that it works on the same principles. The films in which there is an attempt to be deliberately goofy are the weakest (step right up 2 Fast 2 Furious), whereas the most tantalising entries in the franchise are the ones that go full ridiculous with all their heart. You can feel the commitment to sincerity in all the family elements, which grounds the action. That's why Furious 7 can get away with having a car drive between three skyscrapers and then have me sobbing by the credits. There is no winking, no nudging, just the sincere "hey, watch this" of a friend you dearly love attempting to do something very stupid after drinking a full crate of Corona.

The most important thing about the Fast and Furious franchise is that you either will get it or you won't. If you watch a vault get dragged through the streets of Rio and think "well that wouldn't happen", these films are not for you and never will be. If said stunt results in you smiling and giggling without restraint, then you're in for a great ride. No, none of these films are really masterpieces (apart from Fast 5, arguably), but they are exactly what they are. Take them as the meatheaded, Nos fuelled insanity they are or don't. I know for me though, it's ride or die. I'm here until either this franchise dies or I do. Whatever comes next, I'm ready to ride, be it a quarter mile or 62 vertical miles.