Racer Sex. (Spoilers)

Before we get into the nitty gritty, I have seen The Fast and the Furious before now. I watched it for the first time last year and didn’t feel like making a Catching Up about the series because I was already doing one for Mission Impossible. But now I do, so I watched it again on Tubi and I’m going to watch the whole series. I’ve only seen the first film so far  and know virtually nothing about where the series goes except that it gets nuts. I hear Vin Diesel and The Rock are portrayed as being the same height in a sequel, and I don’t know how you get crazier than that.

The Fast and the Furious: Fast and Furious is the first in presently ten hundred films in the Fast and Furious franchise, not including the children’s television show that went for six seasons and not a movie. Six seasons is pretty damn good for a Netflix series. Directed by Rob Cohen who we haven’t covered here on How About Notflix, and written by Gary Scott Thompson, Erik Bergquist, and David Ayer, the movie is based on a Vibe magazine article called Racer X.

The film stars Paul Walker as Brian O’Conner, a professional racist who happens to be an LAPD officer sent to infiltrate the underground ring of racists to figure out who is stealing DVD players in moving truck heists. Looking back in 2024 it’s funny seeing how quaint the plot of this film is. There’s a big heist being planned to the tune of, uh, six million dollars, and they mostly seem to be stealing those TVs with the VCRs attached and various DVD/VCR combo packs. A small beginning considering I heard they race cars in space at some point.

But seriously, for a series where Dominic eventually gets into a martial arts fight against three dozen Hitler clones on the surface of the sun, the idea that the first film is set around a truck heist is crazy. Even more insane is the fact that they don’t even pull off the heist, and the big bad guy is a trucker with no name. A trucker with a shotgun. The race against time is that truckers are getting so pissed off at truck heists that they’re threatening to escalate the violence. Vince (Matt Schulze) in Fast 4 goes back in time to drag race a tyrannosaurus rex to secure the stolen human genome in a crossover with Quantum Leap and ensure humanity’s survival, and in the first film he gets shot and has a tummy ache.

Naturally this film brings in the main characters going forward. Vin Diesel (aka Vin Petrol in the UK) plays Dominic Toretto, that guy who says family a lot. Dom is also a professional racist and in the movie he’s dating Letty Ortiz played by a young Michelle Rodriguez. A life goal we can all dream about, to be sure. Do you realize how hard it is to look these characters up to get information? I’m trying to avoid spoilers and everyone’s wiki page wants to tell me if they’re dead by movie 10. Rick Yune is here as Johnny Tran and I couldn’t wait for him to die. I bet there’s no way someone from Johnny’s crew/family tries to get revenge in a future movie for his death.

The Fast and the Furious is a fun film, and I’m glad I watched it again to kick off this series. It’s a good thing that Cinema Sins didn’t exist back when this came out because the film would have been dragged through the coals for the library of filming mistakes they made. I’m talking very obvious continuity issues where cars completely change models between shots several times and the film glosses over big problems like Brian’s car almost falling apart in the first race only to work completely fine escaping from the police right afterward. Sometimes the ADR gets out of sync with what’s on screen, including when people are talking and it seems inconsistent that Dom would be like “we need to find Jessie before he’s killed” before going off on the heist and not actually finding Jessie.

And the racing scenes are pretty funny when you watch the footage and it’s very obvious that the cars are driving at normal speeds but the film is fast-forwarded and they put a kooky stylistic effect overtop to obscure it. I really don’t care about the inaccuracies with car lingo because it’s a silly movie about cars and 99% of the public isn’t going to care if a specific car model can’t technically support this 985-X Nitro engine block. They just wanna see the cars go zoom, sexy women in skimpy clothing, and muscular dudes. Something for everyone.

Now time to watch 2 Fast 2 Furious: The One Without Vin Diesel. Weird subtitle.