They are fast and they are furious. (Spoilers)

We are now in the fourth Fast & Furious movie, F4st & Furious 2009. I think it’s safe to say that this is the point in the series where the rubber hits the pavement and the plot starts moving and the films can get progressively more ridiculous. I couldn’t help but notice now that we’ve gone past Tokyo Drift that racers stateside suddenly are much more aware on how to drift their cars. Must be a transcendental thing.

I’ve been doing some research on this and evidently Fast & Furious has always been really cagey on the idea of innocent casualties. The two racers in 2 Fast were very obviously brutally killed in their car crashes but they were also criminals and therefore not worthy of sympathy? And the cop deaths are generally hand-waved as “they were corrupt and probably deserved it,” but the films seemingly go the way of Batman in explaining civilian death.

We see bystander cars starting in Fast 4 get absolutely obliterated, crushed, thrown all over the highway going 80 mph, and we’re just kinda expected to believe that they were fine. Or at the very least alive. Everyone in this world seems to end up with pretty minor scratches from the most gut-wrenching car crashes, so maybe everyone in this universe has adamantium bones or something.

Let’s talk about the plot. Dominic has been out of the film since F1, and Brian’s been out of the scene since F2. In the intervening years, Dominic has become a road pirate of sorts in the Dominican Republic and there’s a part of me that believes Dom chose that country because it’s the Dom Republic. Dom, Letty, and crew (including Han Lue) are hijacking fuel tankers because fuel is as valuable as gold in this world. Dom leaves Letty in the hopes that doing so will keep her safe, only to learn a few months down the line that she’s been murdered. Woops.

Fast 4 is a hard movie to watch this far into the series because while I don’t know how the plot goes in future movies, I have some memory of their posters. And I know for a fact that Michelle Rodriguez is a big player in pretty much every movie to come. So the fact that a whole plot is Dominic learning that she’s been murdered and taking revenge on the guy that did it doesn’t have quite the impact when you know the whole time that it’s a fake-out and she’s coming back. I guess it would be interesting to know how she survived since Braga (John Ortiz) is pretty confident that he shot her in the face.

They don’t explain it at all, do they? Le sigh.

It’s really convenient that nitromethane is apparently pretty popular in the real world racing scene, but in the F&F world Dominic knows there’s only one person in LA who supplies it to go after and then one person who owns a 72 Ford Torino Sport for the mechanic to direct him to. Also convenient that both Dom and Brian figured out who their supplier was at the same time so they could meet up in his house just as Dom was about to kill the dude.

Once again it’s astounding how much police incompetence becomes the secondary antagonist for these films. Brian isn’t trusted by the FBI as an agent because they think he keeps betraying them, but he keeps betraying them because they keep screwing him over. In 2 Fast they almost bust his cover multiple times by trailing him, in Fast 4 they almost get him caught because of the tracker they insist on putting in his car. His fellow agents treat him like shit, and he has no reason to be loyal to an agency that offers him nothing in return outside of maybe a clean criminal record.

I also have a big problem with Fast 4’s plot and it has to do with the big twist and how Letty “dies.” As the plot goes, we figure out that Braga kills all his drivers at the end of each run. I have an issue with this because there’s no way this could go down especially in the Fast universe where literally everyone knows everyone else. Because getting a spot on Braga’s crew is apparently a really big deal in the racing world, so you’re asking the audience to accept that a lot of people know about Braga that he has fixers to find racers but nobody pieces together that every one of his drivers seem to die or at the very least disappear during every run.

I’m happy for Brian that he decides to say screw it and bust Dom out of jail at the end of the film, ensuring a life of criminal hijinks in the upcoming films. Because the only people in this universe with less honor and dignity than some of the criminals are the police. And there’s only one currency that is truly priceless; family.

Next up is Fast 5: The Faster and the Furiosa.