The Fast franchise began 20 years ago with The Fast and the Furious, a testosterone-and-gasoline flick that follows underground street racer and notorious electronics thief Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel), his crew, and Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker), the undercover LAPD officer trying to bust them. Though 2021’s F9 isn’t the first example of Universal playing Marvel’s game, its box-office returns suggest it won’t be the last, either. But in the process, it has wound up clumsy and episodic, with the trend toward physics-defying superhero actions and scenarios never fully ringing true.
FAST AND FOURIOUS SERIES
The Fast series hasn’t just adopted Marvel’s focus on team-ups and universe-building, it has been imbued with the MCU’s cinema-dominating scale, style, ethic, and aesthetic, making it nigh-indistinguishable from a superhero franchise. But where the Mission Impossible series has retained a strict internal consistency with its action and its characters’ abilities, the Fast & Furious franchise has become loose and amorphous, going where no street racer from suburban Los Angeles has ever gone before.Īs the Fast & Furious series has developed over the past decade, Universal Studios, director Justin Lin, and producer-star Vin Diesel have mimicked, defied, and attempted to outdo Disney’s central franchise, all in the name of a record-breaking payday. Others, like the Mission: Impossible movies, whose characters fit comfortably in a world of superweapons, martial arts, and feats of inhuman endurance, have adjusted accordingly. In this superhero age, some of the grittier franchise vehicles, like James Bond and Jason Bourne, have managed to maintain their unique style and sense of danger. This glossy, all-encompassing mode brings together marketing, merchandising, and everything seen on screen into one neat and easily digestible package, using a simpler cinematic language that funnels the features into one continuous stream of boundaryless cinema.
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The universe’s heroes are attractive and safe, doing and surviving things physically impossible for the average Joe, aided by all manner of futuristic technology and suitably altered physical laws.
FAST AND FOURIOUS FULL
The heart of this format is the MCU’s bright, polished, CGI-driven aesthetic, which permits only the lightest flavors of each entry’s directors, maintaining a smooth and consistent visual style underpinned by lively color palettes, large setpieces that make full use of their characters’ super-status, and a straightforward approach to filmic time, cinematography, and editing. All the major studios have attempted to follow the gold-brick road: some directly, with superhero franchises of their own, such as Warner’s DCEU and Sony’s freshly renamed SPUMC, and some tangentially, by creating an interconnected universe of recurring characters to draw on, or by applying the Marvel format to films that used to be run-of-the-mill action flicks. Over the past decade, the unprecedented box-office takings for Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe films have ensured that blockbuster cinema has almost exclusively become the domain of the superhero.