The antihero occupies a very special place in America's heart. Sure, we claim to be all about the guy in the white hat, and the stereotypical American to many is a meathead incapable of processing nuance, but we're really drawn to moral ambiguity. This addresses a number of programming issues in America's code from its origins (a democratic republic with unprecedented civil liberties for all enfranchised citizens . . . but only dudes had the franchise and half the country's economy depended on slavery to function; that's some moral ambiguity for your ass) to its mythic adolescence (outlaws and gunfighters, many of whom were little more than psychopathic murderers, were folk heroes in the Old West) to its early adulthood (gangsters fascinated us throughout the 20th century), to the modern day, where many kinds of transgressive behavior are thought of fondly, romantically, titilating in their forbiddenness. The concept of the victimless crime is one man's rationalization, another's justification for cathartic desire to be just that little bit bad. The very word “bad” means “good” in certain contexts. And this, of course, leads us to Dominic Toretto, the charismatic axis of the Fast and the Furious series.
Of course, a biiiiiiig part of Toretto's charisma is the fact that he's played by the incomparable Vincenzo Gasolina, whose talents—having big muscles and a voice so low-pitched at moments it can only be described as the “Vin Diesel octave,” not to mention an ability to make women go “holy Jesus I want to fuck the shit out of this guy but I have no idea why” (though many of them know exactly why)—fit the character so perfectly that it's hard to tell sometimes where Vincenzo ends and Dominic begins. And really, it doesn't fucking matter.
I saw Fast Five yesterday, which consists largely of Vincenzo's dick dragging the ground, when he isn't bludgeoning bad guys—or The Rock, who also appears—with it, or using it to shift his insanely customized Dodge Charger into “fuck you” gear. The movie is fucking great. This whole series is one of the great pleasant surprises in popular culture: an ongoing movie series where each installment builds on the already existing story, that delivers the goods without pandering, is executed with great skill, and unites moviegoers of all ages, genders, races, and levels of cineastic foofery in smiling very wide and going “Wow, that fucking owned.”
It was not always thus. I saw the first movie on cable once, maybe 2003 or 4 or something like that and enjoyed it, but didn't really think one way or the other of it once it was done. I was already an avowed Vincenzo fan, and Rick Yune was fucking great as the villain and everything, and Paul Walker did the whole tango with moral ambiguity fairly gracefully, and the car stunts were rad, and the girls were hot . . . I mean, I enjoyed it. It was just a busy time, I guess, and in any case whenever I needed a Vincenzo fix I had xXx on DVD.
Years later, I was having one of many squabbles with an ex-girlfriend about what movie to watch (I can be undiplomatic, and she could be a bit insular; c'est l'amour, entre les immatures) which she won, and we sat down to watch The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. About thirty seconds in I totally forgot my objections to watching it and succumbed to its wiles.
What made Tokyo Drift so much fun was director Justin Lin's self-aware sense of humor about the kind of picture he was making, and ability to imbue the entire picture with a crooked smile and swagger without mocking the movie or its characters. Lin was both smart enough (watch his debut, Better Luck Tomorrow, for evidence) and a good enough director (see previous) to make a movie that is less “brainless escapism” than “viscerally stimulating.” The plot is simple, the characters similarly so, and you know the good guys are going to win in the end, but the picture is well executed, its attitude toward multiculturalism is refreshing and subtly, matter-of-factly conveyed, and most importantly, it has a massively fucking on-point sense of what's cool.
While the fact that neither Lucas Black's gaijin-in-Japan nor Bow Wow's motormouthed sidekick to same are annoying is cool enough, neither can hold a candle to Sung Kang as Han Lue (the same name as his apparently unrelated character in Better Luck Tomorrow). Han is a thinking man's badass: lounging upside shiny, expensive, ludicrously fast cars, surrounded by shiny, expensive, ludicrously fast women, rarely smiling because, well, shit, that'd take effort but also—as we find out over the course of the picture—he's haunted by his past and despite what lazy Westerners might think, as a Korean he's just as much an outsider in Tokyo as Lucas Black and Bow Wow (these fine “we don't all look alike, motherfucker” distinctions come from having a Taiwanese director in the driver's seat).
Then there are those car stunts. Now keep in mind, I'm not saying this as a bad thing at all—especially in light of the horrible fuckin shit Japan's dealing with these days—but they do love really strange, dangerous things that look awesome, and “drifting” qualifies as all three. Lucas Black shows up in Japan, having basically been kicked out of the United States for LARPing Smokey and the Bandit, thinking “yeah, I'm badass.” Drifting is a whole other ballgame, though, as he soon finds out, and he successfully masters this exotic discipline, leading to some fucking dope car chases, though one of them unfortunately kills Han. (Ed. Note: actually, in light of certain other “deaths” in the series, there's a chance Han made it out of the flaming wreck and there's some awesome explanation why).
Next step was watching The Fast and the Furious again on cable and finding it to be fucking rad, if lacking Justin Lin's directorial flair (Rob Cohen is possessed of a little less subtlety, but that's what makes xXx so magnificent). I even went as far as to watch the second picture, 2 Fast 2 Furious, which despite its many charms (Ludacris, Tyrese and especially Eva Mendes are all massive goddamn fun in it) does, sadly, suffer from a lack of Vincenzo (whose cameo at the end of Tokyo Drift was fucking killer). Still, 2 Fast 2 Furious benefits as the latter three pictures in the series do from having a very talented director at the helm, in this case John Singleton. Like Lin in Tokyo Drift (and, credit where credit's due, Cohen in the first one), Singleton managed to make the interracial friendships plausible, and non-shticky while also not dwelling on them at all; the lack of being beaten over the head with “MESSAGE” makes the message so palatable one doesn't even realize it's there.
This is the best thing about the way race is dealt with in the Fast and the Furious movies: it's not. White, black, East Asian, Latin, undecided (Vincenzo and Jordana Brewster, who fittingly play siblings; their parents must have each been from every continent on Earth), none of it matters in the slightest. All are bonded by their deep and abiding love for cars that go extremely fucking fast. Family is decided by choice, though biological family is still very important.
The fact that Vincenzo and those he regards as family commit crimes only serves to deepen their bond. It sets them apart from society, which fails to recognize Vincenzo and retinue's shared moral code, though it is a legitimate one, if founded on a different set of premises than mainstream society's. Vincenzo may occasionally have to wild on motherfuckers, but not at random and never without justification. This perspective is shared by all his “family” (which includes Sung Kang in Tokyo Drift, of course, as he shows up in the following two, earlier chronologically, movies) and sets them apart not only from civilians but also the bad guys, who are also criminals but ones who behave cruelly and court power for power's sake, rather than as a means to an end.
Now, this may seem a bit high-minded for a series of movies where people drive really fast and blow shit up, but it's all there. It's not spelled out, it's not dwelt on at any length, it's simply as fundamental a fact of life as Vincenzo's muscles. And the fact that if you cross him, Vincenzo Gasolina will fuck you the fuck up. If you're lucky he'll just beat you in a race and take your pink slip.
This is the appeal, in a nutshell of The Fast and the Furious. The title alone is most of the explanation. Americans love cars. Shit, everyone loves cars. Driving really fast ranks in very exalted company in the “most fun things to do with your clothes on” category. Speaking of clothes staying on, that's another reason for the popularity of the series: the relatively chaste PG-13 sexuality. People might get pregnant (Jordana Brewster in Fast Five), but the conception happens off-screen. Men may leer at women (who may be randomly making out with each other for no reason) but those women are always clothed. This is another example, and possibly the weirdest, of the Fast and the Furious series getting to have it both ways: the sex is never repressed, but never so open that it'd offend.
As much fun as the first three pictures (especially Tokyo Drift) are, this really became a series with Justin Lin's follow-up Fast and Furious, where—as hinted in the final scene of Tokyo Drift—Vincenzo is back. And is he ever.
Fast and Furious is a prequel to Tokyo Drift, as evidenced by the fact that Han is still alive. It opens with Vincenzo, Han, Michelle Rodriguez, Tego Calderon and Don Omar pulling a rip and run on a fucking oil tanker in the Dominican Republic (one love Wages of Fear/Sorcerer! What's good?) in a simply goddamn tremendous opening sequence. The car stunts are shot and cut as well as anything outside the Mad Max pictures, and if you can keep up with Australians in anything involving ripshit insanity, you deserve a salute. (Ed. Note: that assessment of Australians as ripshit insane people is tendered with love, respect, and awe, FYI).
We then discover that Paul Walker has somehow managed to not get fired by the FBI yet, and he's hot on Vincenzo's case at the behest of superior Shea Whigham (one of the modern cinema's most underrated Evil White Guys in Suits, but not for long if he keeps owning at it like this). After the bad guys kill Michelle Rodriguez—in a truly surprising twist—Vincenzo returns to the US with an even more menacing glower and a growl an octave lower than the Vin Diesel Octave (the scariest aspect of his quest for revenge), and because it's a Fast and the Furious movie, Paul Walker and Vincenzo end up both trying to infiltrate the bad guy's elite squadron of superfast drivers.
Some people checked out at this point, claiming (heretically) that this was retarded. These people, after they go fuck themselves, are advised to recall the prime directive of the Fast and the Furious universe is “All Else Is Secondary to Driving Incredibly Fucking Fast.” You might as well say the Harry Potter movies are retarded because people use magic. If the villain didn't need people to drive incredibly fucking fast, there would be no movie. So yes, Paul Walker and Vincenzo need to race cars against a couple loudmothed retards under the foolish misconception that the race will end in any way other than Vincenzo and Paul Walker within a tenth of a second of each other. What purpose does this serve? Fuck you, that's what purpose it serves.
The bad guy responsible for all this shit is John Ortiz. Civilians may not have that name on the tip of their tongues, so as a reminder, he played Jose Yero in the movie version of Miami Vice (a picture of which no blasphemy be spoken, ever, lest Godmother Manohla Dargis be forced to send me to break your fucking legs). John Ortiz achieved godhood in that picture with his stylized readings of lines like “maybe we could grab a bite,” pronouncing the latter part like “grabbabiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiite.” He's one of those guys who'd been doing theater for a million years in New York and suddenly started getting cast in above-average roles as the drug dealer/villain guy. This is a rough thing for a lot of Latin actors, as once upon a time, those were the only roles they could get, but Ortiz's apparent approach—jump in with both feet and use the caricature of the over-acted bad guy as a means of redeeming the stereotype and turning it on itself—is not only not that hard to rationalize as a positive artistic statement, but a lot of fun to watch. He always looks like he's having fucking huge amounts of fun playing those roles, and it's just as fun for the audience when they see clips of him actually talking and he's totally just a New Yorker (this shouldn't be underestimated as a factor in my enjoyment of his acting, being a New Yorker myself).
It's paradoxically totally obvious that John Ortiz is actually the real bad guy instead of just the front man and handled so well by Justin Lin and screenwriter Chris Morgan that even though it's not a surprise it feels like one. There's also the fact of his mano derecha, Fenix, being not only a lousy speller but the guy who killed Michelle Rodriguez, meaning that Vincenzo has to fuck him up. This is something no rational being would want visited upon himself, and proof that Dark Helmet had it backwards in Spaceballs when he said “[e]vil will always triumph because good . . . is dumb.” Fuckin villains, always with the hubris.
Part of Vincenzo's larger-than-life (and even larger, amazingly, than his muscles) outlaw mystique is that he totally has to be arrested at the end of the picture, and they send his ass to the clink for life—I mean holy fucking shit at this point Vincenzo is basically a character in a fucking folk song—before Paul Walker proves that he's finally come over to the “good” side by leading a daring raid alongside Jordana Brewster and two of the biggest stars in reggaeton (Ed. Note: when staging a prison break, the fact that you would think to make sure the soundtrack is tight is an indication of the highest motherfucking level of style). Like Tokyo Drift, it points the way to the obligatory sequel, but in such a way that makes you totally want to see the sequel. But even in this, admittedly awesome, regard Fast and Furious can't hold a candle to . . .
Fast Five is, thus far—there are two further sequels in the works, according to both Vincenzo and Justin Lin—the culmination of everything the series has come to be: a refutation of every apparently fucktarded thing about it. It's a movie that only exists because of the car stunts? Yeah, but those car stunts are fucking awesome. It's got a simple, derivative plot that coasts on its actors' charisma and chemistry? Yeah, but that charisma lends greater resonance to the pulp plot and eventually (shockingly) coheres into a compelling pulp supernarrative that poses a profound question about what it truly means to be an outlaw. It's verging on the “more is better” conundrum of adding apparently unnecessary elements (in this case, having The Rock be the elite Fed after Vincenzo et al)? Yeah, but The Rock fucking owns in this, to the degree that calling him Dwayne Johnson, as he's billed, doesn't really do him proper justice, whether that's his own name or not.
Fast Five opens with a brilliantly concise, perfectly tuned recap of where the previous picture left off, with Paul Walker and everybody springing Vincenzo from custody. We then pick up with happy couple Paul Walker and Jordana Brewster (having gotten Vincenzo's grudging approval in the last movie) heading down to Rio in the midst of lean times (to top it all off, she's preggers), when they run into one of the dudes from the first movie, Matt Schultze, who's living in Rio with his wife and young kid in the middle of the set of City of God (Fast Five being under the impression that there are three places in Rio de Janeiro: the statue of Jesus, the favelas, and a couple blocks along the beach that look like Miami; this isn't a flaw or anything, pretty much the only parts of Rio where they have enough guns and illegally modded cars to hang out in a Fast and the Furious movie are the favelas). The moment Matt Schultze mentions that he's got a line on a job, stealing a couple high-end cars, everyone in the audience goes “YES! CARS! FUCK! GO!” and Paul Walker and Jordana Brewster are like “awwwwwww yeeeeeahhh.”
Turns out the cars they're stealing have been impounded by the DEA and the doodz who threw Matt Schultze the job are baddies in the employ of one Hernan Reyes (Joaquim de Almeida, one of South America's finest villainous character actors), who, because this is a Fast and the Furious movie is the ONE GUY who controls all of organized crime in Rio and maybe all of Brazil (somewhere Lil' Ze and Knockout Ned are rolling their eyes, sighing, and muttering “Se apenas fosse esse o caso . . .”)
Vincenzo—who joins the job by swaggering on screen in one of the greatest fucking intros ever—and Paul Walker send Jordana Brewster off with one of the cars and stay behind to kill the bad guys and do extremely well-edited things with cars. Only problem is, the bad guys kill some DEA agents (for which Vincenzo and Paul Walker take the blame) and Joaquim de Almeida and his dudes capture Vincenzo and Paul Walker, who are unimpressed. After JDA monologues at them and leaves the room, Vincenzo and Paul Walker escape, having learned that JDA is looking for something in the car Jordana Brewster fucked off with.
They discover that what JDA's after is a chip that, conveniently, has every byte of data about JDA's illegal activities (which calls to mind Stringer Bell's classic rhetorical ode to forethought and caution: “Nigga, is you takin notes on a criminal fuckin conspiracy?”) But before they can get too comfortable figuring out what to do next, a challenger appears, hopping off a plane from sweet home Estados Unidos with about a half a dozen dudes who between them have exhausted the Western hemisphere's anabolic steroid supply. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you The Rock:
“Alright, listen up. The men we're after are professional runners. We find them; we take them as a team and we bring them back. And above all else, we never ever let them get into cars.”
This is a clear indication that ol' Rocky's been beefing up his intellect along with his biceps: as a rational man he knows that if you get Vincenzo Gasolina get into a car, ownage is a foregone conclusion. Rock liaises with the local cops, who are choads and furthermore in JDA's pocket (the exception to both is Rock's knuckle-gnawingly hot translator, who joined the force to avenge her cop husband's death and is subsequently the only honest cop on the Rio PD), and tries to stage a nice, clean raid to bring in Vincenzo except JDA's thugs fuck everything up and the good guys get away after a rooftop chase scene that's almost as cool as the one in District B13 (but neither Vincenzo, Jordana Brewster, nor Paul Walker, alas, are as limber as David Belle).
Vincenzo, whose balls have a gravity well, decides that the thing to do, with every cop and gangster in a notoriously violent country after him, is to rob JDA of over $100 million in cash, which is going to be stored in a state-of-the-art vault inside a fucking police station. Hey, why the fuck not, go H.A.M. or go home, that's what I always say. Paul Walker, in response says, “Good idea, Vincenzo. Let's get every single surviving supporting character from the whole series to help us out.” (Ed. Note: paraphrase) and Vincenzo, in response, expresses his assent in the Vin Diesel Octave.
This is how Tyrese, Ludacris (both from 2 Fast 2 Furious), Sung Kang (from Tokyo Drift), Don Omar, Tego Calderon, and the mouth-watering Gal Godot (all from Fast and Furious; and no, the last is an Israeli model-actress, not a high-concept “His Girl Friday written by Samuel Beckett” joke I made when stoned) all end up coming down to Rio to form the world's most tuneful, most decorative, most speeding-ticketed heist team. They get to work and put together a plan that requires awe-inspiring balls, fancy driving, and a couple brief variances in the laws of physics to pull off, but these formulate the trinity of the Fast and Furious universe, thus making it the perfect plan.
Fate intervenes in the form of excessive competence on the part of The Rock—who is quite fucking badass in this, and just about the only worthy police adversary left for Vincenzo—who totally busts Vincenzo (after Vincenzo beats the fucking shit out of him in a fight scene that's actually kind of scary) and Paul Walker, only to have JDA's doodz show up and ambush them, killing all The Rock's doodz, leaving he and his translator no choice but to join forces with Vincenzo.
The monkey in the wrench, however, is that Vincenzo is dead set on going through with the heist. Everybody's like, “dude, I know the sun revolves around your balls, but seriously, this is fucking suicide,” but Vincenzo's hearing none of it. Until a very manly voice chimes in:
“I'm in.”
Dwayne motherfucking Johnson, reporting for duty. This moment was sufficiently awesome to elicit an almost awed “WORD!” from the gentleman sitting next to me (Ed. Note: this was an afternoon show on a Monday and the theater was fucking packed. This one ain't stoppin with the $86 mil opening weekend folks, this picture's gonna make a lotta money) and an immediate change of heart from Mr. Paul Walker and subsequently everyone else in the room. I mean, this one's a no-brainer. Following Vincenzo into battle is one thing; sure, you still follow him but he's the kinda guy who might get killed in a movie someday, he just has that Beowulf/Beat Takeshi/existential roid-martyr vibe, know'm sayin? But Vincenzo AND The Rock? Fuck outta here, you might kill one of them but you couldn't kill both of them without Arnold Schwarzenegger and even then you'd need twelve movies.
So our outlaw squadron swaggers into the breach and totally fucking house JDA's vault. Every cop in Brazil pursues, including JDA and his mão direita. Vincenzo and Paul Walker drag the vault behind their two heavily reinforced, awesomely fast cars through the streets of Rio; naturally, lots of shit gets destroyed (including, to Jordana Brewster's great amusement back at the command center, a bank), but because they're the good guys (and somehow this is justified through their driving ability; don't ask me how, it just is, and legitimately, no less) no innocent bystanders get killed.
As the terrific chase sequence draws to a conclusion, Vincenzo has one last “fuck this, I'm going to take one for the team” moment, and goes and plays chicken with JDA, using the vault like it's his car's tail to destroy cop and bad guy cars, concluding with JDA's. Paul Walker, because he's got Vincenzo's back til the end, shoots JDA's mão direita. The Rock and his translator drive up, and Rock passes JDA's broken, mumbling form on the ground. Rather than any big dramatic “YOU BETRAYED ME!” histrionics out of Mr. Johnson, he just puts two in JDA's head as he walks past like it ain't even a thing (a move that elicited a “HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO SHITTTTT!!!!!!!!” from the audience). Rock then pulls some straight up Western shit on Vincenzo: the old “I'm keeping the vault, I'm still gonna chase you, and I'll be coming for you in 24 hours” routine, where it's heavily wink-wink-nudge-nudged that you get the fuck out of Dodge, as when I come for you in 24 hours and you're not there I guess it's God's will or something. THIS IS HOW MEN DO THINGS. Naturally, Vincenzo and team have pulled a switcheroo and made off with the $100 mil, and vanish into thin air, and Rock smiles: “Yes, Vincenzo, you are a worthy adversary.” The whole “two sides of the same coin” thing between cop and crook is as old as time, but never has it been executed with such large muscles as it is here. The team-up of Vincenzo and The Rock could not have gone better, in any possible universe.
Then, during the credits, a surprise scene. First, Eva Mendes is back! Looking muy caliente, by the way. She walks into Rock's office at The Government and tells him, I got somethin' for ya. She hands Rock a dossier . . . HOLY FUCKING FUCK MICHELLE RODRIGUEZ IS STILL ALIVE IN GERMANY! Stay tuned for The Fast and the Furious Part Six! HELL yes.
This series defies every typical expectation for a movie franchise. Starting with a not-bad but unremarkable crime picture with a vivid, palpable obsession with cars, it's become—and yes, I'm serious—an epic pulp narrative that defines a very real aspect of our time: a plausibly post-racial, international society of adrenaline addicts who don't take orders from The Man. They believe in nothing but each other and the moment, living their lives, as Vincenzo says in the first movie: “a quarter mile at a time.” These movies are fast. They're furious. They're fucking awesome.
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