Return to the Main List
Visit Main Blog
The General Story: In the heart of LA, street
racing is King. The Prince of the roads is Dom Toretto (Vin Diesel), an
experienced driver who puts other wanna-be’s to shame every week. Meanwhile, a
team of elite drivers dressed in black gear, hijack trucks with high-tech
gadgets and weaponry. Who are they? And why are they stealing truck shipments?
Cue young LAPD officer Brian O’Connor; ordered by his superiors to infiltrate
the street racing scene and find out who’s behind these sophisticated crimes.
He gets a cool car to fit in with the street racing elite but can’t drive too
well. And how long can he keep up the trick of being an undercover copy, while
falling for the sister of the criminal he’s spying on?
What influenced the movie: Personally, I don’t recall any stand out
films about street racing prior to The Fast and the Furious. Certainly, sports
car racing had been done on screen with the likes of “Days of Thunder” and the
terrible “Driven”, but The Fast and the Furious seemed to be a film that no one
new they wanted to see, because nothing like this had been done before and upon
its release, it was an instant sensation. And where it succeeded, was taking
the look and feel of illegal street racing in LA, infusing it with characters
who seemed both larger than life and seemingly normal, and drove on the fine
line between reality and fantasy.
How the movie influenced the 00's: The Fast and the Furious has had more
influence on culture, than on the movies themselves. Any other film or
franchise that tried to emulate its success would be seen as a pale imitator,
but it can’t be ignored that the popularity of the film, projected illegal street
racing into the spotlight, taking it out of the night shadows of the city
streets and into the plain view of day. In the wake of the film’s influence and
popularity, there were some instances in the United
States were over-confident drivers decided to replicate one such scene from the
film, where one of the characters drives his car under a long semi-trailer.
With just enough room to fit his car underneath the truck, the character pulled
off a cool move, adding to the excitement and entertainment of the film. It
didn’t turn out so well for one such driver in “the real world” as he was
killed trying to do the same thing.
What makes it stand out as a film of the
00's: The first film in
this long-running series has 2001 written all over it. Some of the cars that
feature here were cool then, but seem old hat now, and the music, clothing
style, street talk and technology was certainly evident here as being turn of
the 21st century. And given that cars, technology and style has evolved
so quickly in the 00’s, the films have had no trouble keeping up with that and
used the trends of the time to drive their story’s. with each new instalment,
the look and style of the film changes to suit the times, but still maintains its
original integrity and appeal, driven by the likeable characters and strong acting
ensemble.
Impact of the movie still felt today: at the time of writing this review, it’s
2018, and we’ve seen eight films in the Fast and Furious saga, with two more to
come in 2020 and 2021 respectively. Where the series took a turn off the road into
mediocre with “F&F: Tokyo Drift”, the original gang came back for the
fourth instalment, “Fast and Furious” which showed the series still had some
fuel in its tank. And it was 2011’s “Fast Five’ that took the series to a whole
other level, changing the landscape from just street racing, to a heist movie,
and now with the most recent “The Fate of the Furious”, we see our beloved
characters working as mercenaries, outrunning nuclear submarines on ice and
dodging missiles. The Fast and the Furious of 2001 paved the way for all it’s
subsequent sequels, continuing to set the bar higher, the cars faster and the situations
even dumber, but every couple of years we still flock to the cinema to see Vin Diesel,
Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham duke it out in cool cars all over the world, keeping
us ridiculously entertained for a couple of hours. I have no problem with
spending $20 for that. What will we do when the series ends in 2021? Watch them
all over again I suppose.
Return to the Main List
Visit Main Blog
No comments:
Post a Comment