The Fast & Furious franchise
Illustration: Jacey
Chris: How did we get here? How did this franchise that started out about car thieves turn into an overblown love letter to preposterousness and become one of the biggest movie franchises of all time?
Helen: It was nearly dead. I was the only person at Empire who went to a press screening for Tokyo Drift. Everybody else was like, “No, not even bothering.”
Chris: Well, if Vin Diesel and Paul Walker couldn’t be bothered, why should we?
Helen: Absolutely. But there were the glimmerings there, thanks to Justin Lin, who got what mattered and jettisoned the rest. It amped up the action a lot, sometimes to a ridiculous degree. And then he went back after that and got the original cast and made them cooler than they had been.
Ben: It became a perpetual motion machine. There are so many ingredients that make Fast what it is these days, but one of them is Vin Diesel taking it super-seriously, while everyone else is having the best time possible. I think it was this real commitment to big, crazy but really fun action. It’s playing by its own rules, and those are not the rules of gravity.