I have never seen the first three films in the Fast/Furious franchise. I went to a screening of the fourth, Fast and Furious, in order to conduct a research experiment that I’ve been wanting to try for awhile: how do late-in-the game sequels parcel out information about the worlds their predecessors have created, and do they even try to convert new fans, or simply satisfy old ones? Keeping in mind that I entered into this enterprise with science as a primary motivator over criticism, here is a summary of my findings:
1. In the first scene, Michelle Rodriguez and Vin Diesel are together in a car, driving alongside an oil truck on a twisty mountain road. Apparently in cahoots with two other pairs in two other cars (both of whom, audience reaction would suggest, are familiar from previous films in the franchise), Vin and Michelle are planning to use their driving skills to steal gas. When the time is right, Michelle kisses Vin (thus telling us that they are a couple — and, since IMDB indicates they haven’t been in a Fast & Furious film together since the franchise’s opening salvo in 2001, they’ve presumably been together without incident for the eight years in between), then climbs out the window of the moving car, announcing the film’s rallying cry and raison d’etre as she moves: “Let’s make some money!” Wink wink, LOL y’all, although in a world where Tina Fey addresses the sponsors of the TV show she produces whilst in front of the camera as its star, for a quadquel to pointedly anticipate and address criticism that it’s a stale leftover reheated for cash before the opening action setpiece even kicks into high gear, feels weirdly stale and reheated in itself.
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Next week, Vin Diesel returns (along with Paul Walker, Michelle Rodriguez and Jordanna Brewster) to the Fast and the Furious franchise, which he’d abandoned after the first movie (he did have a cameo in part 3). When news first hit that he’d be reprising the role of Dominic Toretto for the fourth installment, simply titled Fast & Furious, most of us saw the actor as returning under a veil of shame. Because he initially departed the series with an inflated ego — and with it unrealistic salary demands — it does seem obvious that Diesel is now only desperately crawling back because his career failed to take off the way he’d hoped it would.
This is quite sad considering not even Steve Guttenberg ever crawled back to the Police Academy movies, nor did Burt Reynolds ever get dragged back for a fourth Smokey and the Bandit. But there have been other shameful returns by stars to franchises they’d previously sat out of (whether the hiatus was of their own choosing or not). Only one of these may have been as desperate as Diesel now appears, but it’s worth looking at four additional actors and actresses who should be very embarrassed of their delayed reprisals.
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