No more Brian. (Spoilers)

Why is Fast 6 afraid of Fast 7? Because Fast 7 Fast 8 Fast 9. The eighth (probably) film in the series, Fate of the Furious released in 2017 and made 1.2 billion dollars at the box office. That’s a lot of Twinkie money. Directed by F. Gary Gray, a name destined to be spelled wrong every time he fills out a government form. You may know the dude from another popular car movie; The Italian Job. Mama mia. F8 was written by Chris Morgan who has written every Fast & Furious movie since 3. Oh and 47 Ronin.

Fast 7 is where the series hit its zenith and Fate of the Furious is where it begins its endless downward slide into eventually getting cancelled when it doesn’t make a shit ton of money. F7 made $1.5 billion in the box office while F8 made $1.2 billion and everything after that has been in the $700 million zone. Still decent returns on a generally $200 million budget but a sign that audiences have gotten kinda sick of the concept and far more risky in our post-Covid theater world.

How does one continue ramping up the story after Fast 7? Well this is a western anime so the only thing to do when your team has beaten pretty much everyone is to make them beat themselves. Dominic is recruited by the bad guys to turn on his family and hijack an EMP device, resulting in Hobbs being arrested and the team to lose a little bit more of their family. Further into the story Dom is recruited by Cipher (Charlize Theron) to attack the Russian minister of defense and take his codes for the nuclear bombs. Why? So she can hijack a nuclear sub and bomb a city if governments do shit she doesn’t like. It’s not that well explained.

In a move that nobody saw coming since the last anime did it, Dominic is easily able to outgun the combined forces of his crew because he’s the boss guy and that gives him more power. Dom even resists and breaks free when five of his former team take turns penetrating him in New York City. There’s probably a better way to word that but it’s technically not incorrect. Also in true anime spirit Deckard becomes a reluctant good guy who nobody trusts and he threatens to kick the shit out of everyone, but through progressively better hearted ribbing they start to get along and learn more about each other and become family.

He did kill Han Lue, but Vin Diesel wasn’t around to point that out and now he’s received too many family points to kick out and he also saved Dom’s kid at the end so who cares about that Han Lue asshole. Cipher does survive the film and I assume is going to be the main antagonist of F9. I love Kurt Russell as Mr. Nobody and Scott Eastwood as Little Nobody. After some of the films he’s been in, Clint must be disappointed that his son plays kind of a pussy who admittedly gets better as the film progresses and becomes less of a book-wielding weenie.

There’s an obligatory street race at the beginning of the movie with the prize being respect, and a cool scene of Dom racing with a piece of shit car and winning because it’s not what’s under the hood that matters. It’s family. Oh and the crew has to race against a nuclear sub. Yeah, that’s how you one up a tank, a plane, and a train. A nuclear frickin sub in a race against cars. I hear F9 has a scene where they race in space. Space racists.

Fate of the Furious has everything to keep ramping up the Furious series. How do you one-up racing a big plane? How about a zombie army taking over a small part of a Russian city? And not just any zombie army. A zombie army made up of zombie cars. Imagine World War Z the film if instead of zombies it was expensive looking cars piling over each other and falling from the buildings. Some dork must have gone through the process of calculating how much insurance damage is caused in each film by now, right?

The big problem with F8 is that by this point in the series is getting stupid. Really goddamn stupid. It takes a lot of effort to ignore the massive civilian body count that this series is racking up but refuses to acknowledge. I’m not asking for an apology or a “our guys aren’t that great” commentary, but it’s crazy how the series just ignores what are clearly civilian cars with people in them getting blown up, crushes, and obliterated during these street fights. I think pretty much every unnamed cop that dies in the series was secretly corrupt so it’s okay. Maybe it’s like Batman where most of the good guys that aren’t killed for plot purposes are presumed just crippled off-screen, they don’t die.

Also the films are getting really bloated and long. F8 was nearly two and a half hours and was so packed with stuff that the film had to skip to the end of the first heist just so we could get the ball rolling on Dom’s betrayal. I wanted to see them steal the EMP! I didn’t want a three hour film, but there is so much stuff going on that the already long films can’t even keep all the plot contained and have to cut corners for time.

I wonder if they’ll be racing on the surface of the sun by the time F11 comes out. If Tom Cruise was in this film he’d demand the director figure out a way to let him do that in real life.