A Rapid Week of Rage: The Fast and the Furious

To celebrate the release of Furious 7 this Easter Sunday, each night, I’ll watch one Fast & Furious movie and report on my findings. Join me as I follow our valiant illegal drag-racers as they tokyo drift across the various speed bumps and barricades life throws at them. I began with original recipe, the movie that changed all movies about speed and anger thereafter, The Fast and the Furious (2001).

What happens:

The Fast and the Furious opens as all movies should: with a daring high-speed night truck highjacking. Three black Honda Civics with green underglow surround a tractor trailer full of (almost exclusively) Panasonic electronic equipment. A man emerges from the lead car to fire a grappling hook through the truck’s windshield, then shimmies up the cable to tranquilize the driver and take control of the cab.

We then cut to young Brian Spilner (Paul Walker), in signature black Chuck Taylors (ideal driving shoes?), engaging in some solo drag racing in a green sports car that looks like a Capri Sun print ad with a spoiler. He later rolls up in a plain red work truck to Toretto’s Cafe, where he always orders a tuna on white (with no crust) from the server, Mia Toretto (Jordana Brewster). Her brother, Dominic (Vin Diesel) lingers menacingly in the back in his sweat-stained makeshift muscle shirt. A few hot cars roll up, and Dominic’s crew — which includes Michelle Rodriguez as Letty and Chad Lindberg as a mechanical savant in a Remy Shand knit cap, Jesse — emerge, and they are none too pleased to see this blonde pretty-boy at Toretto’s again. “What is he, sandwich crazy?” (Like, who isn’t?)

Vince (Matt Schulze), who immediately positions himself as the angry hothead in Dominic’s team, tries to intimidate Brian, shouting homophobic slurs and jumping him as he goes to his car. Mia pleads for Dominic to break up their fight. Dom arrives and lays down the law, telling Brian he’s not welcome back, and he’ll get him fired from his job at Harry’s, an automotive dealer who supplies many of the street racers in suburban Los Angeles. Brian returns to work and Harry warns him not to get on Dominic’s bad side: Dominic is the king of street racing in L.A. and he’s good for their business. Brian, determined to show Dom up on the streets, purchases some ‘NOS’ (nitrous oxide) to augment his car, despite Harry’s warnings.

That night, Brian arrives at the staging ground for an illegal street race. Young men and women are loitering by their souped-up cars, blasting (at one point) “Rollin‘” by Limp Bizkit, and divided into gangs along racial lines. Hector, leader of the Mexican-American crew, takes pity on the white guy flying solo and starts talking to Brian. Edwin (Ja Rule!) joins their conversation, leaving them with a bit of wisdom: “It’s not how you stand by your car, it’s how you race it.”

Dominic and his team eventually arrive and outline the rules of the race: everyone puts up $2,000, winner takes all. Brian doesn’t have the money but wants in on the race. He offers his car up as collateral. The hordes of street racers block off a nearby street and five drivers – Dominic, Edwin, Hector, an unnamed Asian guy, and Brian – take their places. Brian brings up a laptop that is (somehow) connected to his car and NOS supply. During the race, Brian uses his nitrous too early and too often, losing the floor of his car and burning out. Dominic wins easily. Still, Brian endears himself to Dominic, grinning like a fool after losing. “Why are you smiling?” Dominic asks. “I almost had you,” Brian beams. The two banter and gently rib each other to the jeers of the assembled onlookers for a while. Then the cops arrive and abruptly end this beautiful, blossoming friendship.

Dominic quickly outruns the cops and parks in a garage, then casually strolls away (sans car). But an eagle-eyed patrolman recognizes him as notorious street racer Dominic Toretto, which lands them in a car/on-foot chase. But Vin Diesel can’t outrun a police car forever, so it’s lucky that Brian rolls up in his busted (but still quite fast) fluorescent green car and rescues him. During their car-based escape, Dominic reveals he did a background check on Brian (when?) and knows he’s spent time in juvenile detention. “You can find anything on the web. Anything about anybody,” Dom warns Brian and (one assumes) the audience. Dom himself did a two-year stint in prison and says he’ll die before he returns. Their conversation is interrupted by a gang of Vietnamese-American bikers, who force them off the road into the T & K Food Market parking lot. They reveal themselves as Johnny Tran (Rick Yune) and the amazing snakeskin-pant-wearing Lance Nguyen (Reggie Lee), and vaguely threaten Dominic to stay off their turf. While Dom and Brian are standing outside, talking about why Tran and him have such bad blood, Tran and Nguyen return and shoot up Brian’s car.

Brian and Dominic then have a slow walk to Dominic’s car, and when they arrive back at Dominic’s place, a raucous party is in full swing. Dominic, understandably, is a little upset his crew didn’t come looking for him and instead got their party on. Vince is busy trying to impress women by playing guitar (ugh) when Dom walks in, takes his beer (“You can have any beer you want, as long as it’s a Corona.”), and offers it to Brian. Letty takes Dom upstairs to be massaged, while the other members of Dom’s crew try to threaten the new guy, Brian. Mia rescues Brian from Vince and Leon and the two budding lovebirds enjoy a Snapple together.

That’s when the twist hits (which is not a twist to anyone who’s read the movie’s synopsis). Out for a drive, Brian is pulled over and arrested. He’s brought to a secret police headquarters (improbably, the former home of Liz Taylor), where it’s revealed Brian Spilner is actually Brian O’Conner, an undercover cop attempting to find the street-racing gang behind a series of truck highjackings. The police and FBI think it’s Toretto, but Brian doesn’t believe them. His police colleagues warn him he shouldn’t get charmed by Toretto, that Dominic went to prison for a vicious assault. But it’s too late: Brian has become one of Dominic’s team, and he’s soon working in their garage, bonding with Jesse (an automotive genius who would be at M.I.T. if not for his ADD), and wooing Mia. He’s even invited over for a barbecue, during which Dom (dressed in an unbuttoned Von Dutch work shirt) makes Jesse say a prayer to the car gods.

Based on an order made a Harry’s automotive store, Brian begins to suspect Hector and his gang of the truck robberies. He follows them to their garage, and breaks in while they’re revelling at El Gato Negro. However, the tires on their black Honda Civics don’t match the evidence. As he’s exiting, he’s pistol-whipped by Vince and brought to Dominic. Vince has been following him and is convinced he’s a cop. He keeps Brian at the business end of his shotgun while Dominic interrogates him. Brian pretends he was spying on their cars in advance of the upcoming ‘Race Wars’ (an upcoming race in the desert), so Dominic calls his bluff and takes him to the Tran garage to spy on their rides. However, their spying is interrupted by the arrival of Johnny Tran and his gang, who are in the middle of threatening a local fence who (possibly) stole their car engines, abusing him and forcing motor oil down his throat. While they’re hiding, Brian notes the abundance of Panasonic equipment stored in the garage. All evidence points to Tran’s crew as the truck highjackers.

Following Brian’s report to the police, the FBI wants to close in on Tran immediately. Brian tries to delay them until they have more hard evidence. The cops worry that Brian has fallen in love with Mia and fallen under the spell of Dominic. Shortly thereafter, Dominic shows Brian the muscle car he and his dad built together. Dominic’s dad was a legal race car driver, who died on the track after another driver intentionally swerved into him. That driver, Linder, is the man Dominic nearly beat to death — an action that put him in jail for two years and got him banned from the legitimate race circuit. Dom confesses he could never drive the black muscle car because of what happened to his dad. Brian then goes on a date with Mia that goes fairly well. When the police call Brian to inform him they’re going to arrest the Tran and Nguyen, he’s in bed with Ms. Toretto.

However, the Tran crew are innocent of the robberies, and the FBI places this black eye squarely (and unfairly) on Brian’s shoulders. (He wanted to wait for more hard evidence, guys!) The feds are convinced now that Dominic Toretto is the criminal mastermind they’re after, and following a rather sexy Vin Diesel / Michelle Rodriguez love scene, Brian and Dominic go for a beachside drive and pleasant lunch. During the lunch, Brian tells Dom he knows he’s involved in some illegal activity and he wants in, too. Dom tells him to be patient; all will be revealed after Race Wars.

Race Wars, which is seemingly held at an abandoned army base in the California desert, is where street racers convene and make various racing wagers. It’s a world where drivers just have glove compartments filled with rolls of $2,000 fastened with rubber bands at the ready. Jesse, like Icarus, flies to close to the Fast and Furious sun by challenging Johnny Tran to a race, offering up his imprisoned dad’s car as the wager. Obviously, Jesse loses to Tran, and — losing it — just drives off into the sunset rather than hand over the car. Tran takes it out on Dominic, as Jesse’s team captain. He also blames Dominic for the SWAT team that arrested him and his friends, embarrassed him in front of his whole family. At this accusation, Dominic lashes out, going into a Perks-of-Being-a-Wallflower-like rage and beating Johnny Tran until his team pulls him off. (Dominic has some unresolved anger issues, obviously.) “I never narced on nobody!” he protests.

While the Race Wars party continue into the night, Brian searches for Mia. He spies her, in the distance, arguing with her brother as Dominic and his team (sans the still AWOL Jesse) drive off. Brian realizes they’re off to pull another truck job. He confides in Mia, telling her he’s an undercover cop and persuades her (after much tearful anger) that she has to help him find Dominic and convince him to stop before he ends up in prison again. Tracking his cell phone, they follow Dominic and his team as they pull a daring daytime truck raid. Vince fires a grappling hook at the van, but as he climbs up onto the hood, the trucker fires at him with a shotgun. The truckers have started arming themselves (shades of A Most Violent Year), and Vince is left dangling, painfully, from the grappling hook cable as (a) the trucker fires shotgun blasts near him, and (b) his fellow drivers are unable to aid him.

Letty tries to pick up Vince, but is forced off the road violently by the trucker and crashes. Leon, on Dom’s orders, pulls back to make sure Letty isn’t too badly injured, while Dominic tries to help Vince, to no avail. Eventually, the trucker shoots Vince in the side, making the already dire situation pretty unfathomable. Luckily, Brian and Mia have caught up. Mia takes the wheel and Brian makes a flying leap onto the truck, releases Vince, and tosses him into the speeding car as the trucker reloads. Brian leaps onto the roof just as the trucker fires, and Mia makes a controlled spin out into the sand as he dangles from the roof.

When Dominic catches up, Mia and Brian are trying to mend Vince through his several layers of mesh tank tops. Brian insists Vince needs an ambulance and calls for a chopper as “Officer O’Conner.” Vin Diesel’s face then goes through every emotion possible as he realizes his new friend is, in fact, a cop. When the helicopter arrives, they part ways. But shortly thereafter, Brian shows up at Dominic’s house, where he’s busy loading a shotgun. Brian draws on him and tells him to stay put, but Dominic insists he has to find Jesse before Johnny Tran comes after him. Coincidentally, Jesse shows up at Dominic’s house at that very moment. And seconds later, Johnny and Lance arrive on motorcycles and spray the entire area with some mid-afternoon Uzi fire. Jesse dies almost instantly, Brian jumps in his sports car, and Dominic overcomes his daddy issues and hops into his muscle car in pursuit of Tran and Nguyen. Brian and Dominic separately dispatch of the two Vietnamese-American gangsters, with Brian showing little regard for wildly firing his pistol out his car window in the middle of the day.

With the Trans dead, Brian chases after Dominic, and the two engage in one final game of chicken. They race each other, desperately trying to beat an oncoming train to the railroad tracks just ahead. Their cars both just barely graze past the train in time, but seconds later, Dominic sideswipes a tractor trailer that appears almost out of nowhere, causing his car to roll about a hundred times. (How symbolic: the very vehicle he often robbed is his undoing.) Brian runs to check on Dominic and his totalled car, but Dominic – totally butch — has already freed himself from the wreck. With sirens approaching in the distance, Brian gives Dom the keys to his car to let him escape. It’s the super-chill version of Keanu Reeves firing his gun into the air to let Patrick Swayze escape.

Takeaway points:

• As that last line suggests, and as countless reviewers have pointed out, The Fast and the Furious borrows heavily from the action movie Point Break. Really, The Fast and the Furious is just Point Break with illegal street racing in the place of surfing. And just as Bodhi speaks rapturously of the transcendence and ultimate rush of riding that perfect wave (and as the dancers of Step Up speak of the release of dance), Dominic Toretto has his show-stopping monologue about the freedom and ecstasy of the race, “living life a quarter-mile at a time.”
• There should be no doubt among most reasonable viewers of The Fast and the Furious that the central relationship is between Dominic Toretto and Brian O’Conner. The Brian / Mia romance is a mere subplot. I’m not going to call this a “bromance” because that’s not a thing. It’s just called a friendship. And everyone has heard enough dullards at parties pointing out “how gay” Top Gun is that I am reluctant to explore the homoerotic undertones of The Fast and the Furious. They are there, but to point at them with glee I feel demonstrates a kind of homophobia (that I have certainly been guilty of in the past) and a deep discomfort of companionate love. The Fast and the Furious, though it features no queer characters (save the two women kissing at Dom’s house party) and for all its rugged masculinity, does not promote homophobia. Vince uses the word “faggot” as an insult, but viewers understand immediately that Vince is a bad dude, and clearly the most hateful of Dom’s crew. Likewise, when Vince mocks Brian for helping with the dishes after the barbecue, hammering him with his conservative gender roles, it is Brian (“the cook doesn’t clean where I come from”) O’Conner who is shown to be in the right. The Fast and the Furious is a movie about love and it’s the companionate love between Dom and Brian. You can see it from their broad grins after they first race each other. If you are not on board with how adorable Paul Walker and Vin Diesel are as they gently mock each to the jeers of a crowd, you will never understand their love. They talk about each other like the best of partners: with qualitative compliments. Brian, pretending he is only drawn to Mia, is enraptured as she talks about how her brother is like gravity, pulling people to him. Dom gently advises Brian not to lose that cool of his, how it’s one of his best qualities. For all its graphic bro-vertures and often troubling depiction of women (a woman offers her breasts to Edwin as a potential reward for winning a drag race), this is a movie about two men not afraid to love each other. My favourite moment is when Brian and Dominic, cruising along the shore, roll up to a rich twerp and his girlfriend in a Ferrari. In a clear mirror and inversion of the stereotypical boy/girl drag race pissing matches, it’s Brian’s ostensible date Dominic who urges, “Smoke ‘im.”
• I found it a little troubling that the big desert street racing festival was named Race Wars. Especially in a film where the racing teams were so clearly divided along racial lines. As is the case in most dance films, the team the audience is allied with, eschews racial segregation, comprised of a crew from different racial backgrounds. The audience unconsciously (as well as, one would hope, consciously) roots for multiculturalism and diversity. As with most dance films, though, that protagonist crew is predominantly white, which makes the Race Wars so unintentionally troubling.
• The Fast and the Furious also owes a bit to the Western tradition. When a police officer worries of Brian O’Conner is “going native” on them, it harkens back to movies like The Searchers or even non-Westerns like Apocalypse Now, where the greatest fear among the representatives of white authority (police, military) is that one of their own will become enamoured with a group of a different race or culture or class that threatens their white authority. Become one of them. In The Searchers, it’s a white West Texan teenager that ‘goes native,’ devastating the authorities. In The Fast and the Furious, it’s simply a gender swap of that same situation.
• I was amazed at how often The Secret was referenced in this movie. On at least two occasions, our drivers are encouraged to visualize themselves winning, to send that message out into the universe. (In both cases, though, The Secret fails.)
• Where did Ja Rule go? He was barely in this movie after the first race! (I guess he was off recording “Always on Time” with Ashanti.)

How fast?: The characters in the movie use the word ‘NOS’ more frequently than they say each other’s names, so we’re talking pretty fast here.

How furious? To be honest, it’s not that furious. Dominic has some real anger issues, and a tendency to go on a non-stop punching spree. But he doesn’t rage out at the betrayal of Brian when he finds out he’s an undercover cop. So, this movie is more fast than furious.

Favourite car stunt: When Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) slides her car underneath (!) the tractor trailer to get on its right side during the final truck heist, I definitely yelped.

Most magical soundtrack sue: Ja Rule, in addition to acting in The Fast and the Furious, is all over the soundtrack. And when his “Life Ain’t a Game,” featuring a sample from Depeche Mode’s “Strangelove” starts blasting over the montage of Brian working in Dominic’s garage and befriending the various team members, it’s pure joy.

Unexpected cameo: Brian’s police captain is played by Ted Levine, who is probably best known as the ultra-terrifying Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs. (Don’t trust him, Brian!)

Bechdel Test Moment: At one point, Letty approaches some women who are fawning over Dominic and announces, “I smell skanks,” but otherwise I don’t think this movie passed the Bechdel Test.

Line of dialogue that makes it clear we’re talking both about a car and the driver’s sexual organ(s): ‘”It’s an amazing machine.” – Lance Tran (to Brian Spilner)

Best fashion moment: I loved Letty’s flame-detailed moon boots, and had, like, very strong feelings about seeing her in half-undone coveralls. And there’s something to be said about Vince’s mesh tank tops worn over non-mesh tank tops as a general look. But you can’t beat Dominic’s beach business casual look. He hops into Brian’s car wearing sunglasses, a partially unbuttoned cornflower blue shirt, and some nice chinos, looking for all the world like a magnum-sized Pitbull.

Next up: 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003).