I am a film snob. For the past sixteen years, one sign of that snobbery was having never seen any of the Fast and Furious movies. The shallow stories of fast cars, scantily-clad women, and outrageous action scenes didn’t seem worth the time. Then, Doris entered the scene. Doris (not her real name) is a teenage neighbor who came to live with my wife and me. She loves these movies. As a way to bond with her, I pledged to watch one Fast and Furious movie every month leading up to the release of this eighth movie, The Fate of the Furious. Welcoming Doris into my life has meant welcoming these movies too, letting go of my snobbery a little.
Thankfully, I have enjoyed them more than I expected. They have more depth than I realized. Along with the cars, women and explosions, the series focuses on community and family. Vin Diesel plays Dom Toretto, a street racer and mechanic who also carries out daring heists. The movies all play off of his fierce loyalty to his team and theirs to him. Characters add and subtract, and they change from criminals to government agents, but they stay devoted to each other. They call themselves family, and Dom always says they are the most important thing in the world.
That’s why it’s so shocking when, here in The Fate of the Furious, Dom abandons the team and joins the other side. A shady villainess, Cipher, shows him something on a cell phone so powerful that he goes against everything he stands for. I won’t reveal what it is, but it puts him in quite an ethical pickle. The woman manipulating him turns out to be the biggest supervillain of the series so far, the evil behind the last few plots. She’s using Dom to steal the elements that will make her a nuclear superpower on the international stage, and it all comes down to stealing a Russian submarine in the frozen Arctic.
So we have cars, tanks and snowmobiles racing across an ice sheet with a giant submarine moving underneath. It’s a big, crazy, implausible action scene, which is how all these movies end. But The Fate of the Furious taxes our suspension of disbelief less than the previous few installments which have featured cars jumping from skyscraper to skyscraper hundreds of feet in the air, parachuting out of planes, or other distractingly ridiculous things. (I was most put off by the end of number 6, a 30-minute high-speed chase of a jumbo jet with no turns – which means the runway must be about 45 miles long.)
The Fate of the Furious also includes an earlier chase scene in New York City, in which Cipher has hacked into hundreds of vehicles’ computers to turn them into life-size remote-controlled cars. In a series where so much of the action deals with drivers’ abilities to weave in and out of other cars, turning those cars into a hive-minded swarm is a clever, thrilling turn. This scene also makes a fitting metaphor for Cipher’s project. Cars have always represented freedom in these movies, and Cipher turns them into slaves. She bases her manipulation of Dom on choice theory, giving grandiose speeches about agency and evolutionary imperatives. She tries to hack Dom’s mind and heart the way she does the cars. And, of course, ultimately she wants to hack the world. But Dom believes that family love is something greater than a survival instinct, and that trust saves him and his family. No wonder it’s called The Fate of the Furious.
For me and many others, the big question coming into the movie was how they would deal with Paul Walker’s death. Walker’s character, Brian O’Connor, is Dom’s best friend and brother-in-law, a former cop who had imbedded himself undercover with the crew in the first film. Much of the drama of the series has come from Dom and Brian moving to accept, then trust, then love each other as brothers. But the actor died during the filming of the seventh film, and the filmmakers added a send-off for the character after the action climax. Now, the team mentions Brian, but the characters keep him out of the action to protect him from danger since he’s a father. There’s a sad irony: the actor has died, so the character must live.
Ever since Walker’s death, I’ve been perplexed by the public’s reaction. Why so much grief? Much better actors, in my snobby opinion, had died and received less love. Yes, he was young, but so was Heath Ledger. Now, having seen the Fast and Furious series, I think I understand. I see it in Doris, who was one of the mourners. She grieves for Paul Walker as if he really were Brian O’Connor, who has become a beloved friend through these movies, and as if she were one of Dom’s team who has come to love him. These movies show us how trust can grow between unlikely friends, even to the point of a family bond. That’s the same story that I hope is progressing between Doris and me. Against all my expectations, these Fast and Furious movies have been an important chapter for us.