THE FAST & THE SPURIOUS?

There is so much excitement for the latest Fast and Furious installment, The Fate of the Furious, which is the 8th in the series (yes 8th, makes you wonder how much racing, chasing, shooting and blowing shit up one team of car enthusiasts can really do!) and that’s well and good, but I can’t remember the last time I was this apathetic towards a one-time favourite movie of mine and box office beast! But truth is I’ve had my fill of Dominic Toretto and his rag tag of brothers, sister and wife or maybe I’m just tired of seeing Vin Diesel consistently churn out lame catch phrases at an attempt to be lackadaisically cool.

I used to love this series and I still think it’s a great win for the action genre, but guess I just pulled out after Fast and Furious became more than underground racing, drug lords and street level bad guys, now they are in Jason Bourne-Ethan Hunt-James Bond territory, chasing down most wanted terrorists across international borders and doing the governments’ dirty job while saving the whole world just by extreme driving? Might as well slap an XXX on all their necks! Guess Vin Diesel wanted to make more XXX movies all along! (Which he eventually did, but that’s another story).

 I officially lost interest after F5 but I was so on that Bandwagon I didn’t realise it. I thought Fast and Furious 6 was mediocre and saw Furious 7 because I was obliged to, after Paul Walker’s death, like many others I thought it was going to be the honorable and well deserved end to the series, right? wrong! Universal pictures were not about to let their big money spinner just retire in a world where constant franchise releases of the same unimproved formula keep making more money despite the continuing lack of creativity or originality (Call of Duty, Assassin’s Creed I’m looking at you) I mean what else were they gonna write about I thought? Until the sneaky bastards decided to give us another original originality…..*drumroll* Dom turns against the family, the one thing he holds most dear *ominous tune playing* the incorruptible is corrupted, It’s an almost laughable plot, didn’t his wife just do that!? If we’re still gonna have Fast and Furious 9 and 10 with these guys I can only wonder what they’ll think of then, we’d probably find out Hobbs has been Black Adam all along, at least that would explain his sometimes inhuman strength.

Sigh. I know what you’re thinking, Fast and Furious like many other action films don’t usually have cerebral plots as the main selling point of the movie, but having one would never hurt them, but most of the time we just wanna watch intense car chases, gunfights and blow shit up! we’re too busy being awed by the car vaults, somersaults and cardiving  to notice how poor these plots are or if there are any, it’s harder to notice in a one off or trilogy but Fast and Furious have gone the distance and to be honest I’m really surprised they’re making so much money, so from a commercial point of view, I duff my hat, its genius.

Business is business and in that regard I don’t hold anything against the studio or the producers, I mean who doesn’t want more money? And since it makes financial common sense not to shake things up, then why should they? I guess I just hoped they’d find a more inventive way to take our money instead of continually rolling out the same model off the assembly line but with new body parts, a new paint-job, and some decent accessories and call it a new car? I mean film, film.

To be fair, the franchises’ last attempt to break out from the Toretto-O'Conner story arch wasn’t the most successful; Fast & Furious: Tokyo Drift is the least successful of the series with a worldwide box office total of $157,794,205, it didn’t do as good as its prequels or sequels (kinda confusing now considering the chronology of the movies) but it still made almost double its budget ($85m), however this prompted the studio to revert to the status quo, (sticking with the established and more popular characters) but we all know there could have been better stories and more interesting characters that this franchise may have produced.

I haven’t seen the movie and neither do I intend too anytime soon, I’ve personally decided to boycott this movie from my cinema viewing list and will wait till its free on cable or a bootleg edition makes like a stripper and drops on my lap, considering we still have two more of these to go, I’ll be keeping my money for this one, Thank you very much.