[dropcap]I[/dropcap]t’s hard to believe that it’s been fourteen years since we first saw Paul Walker and Vin Diesel ride or die and wax poetic on the nature of honor. 2001’s The Fast and the Furious was fun, but it was dumb fun. If you’d have told me that I’d be in a theatre seven films later, watching almost everyone from the first bid adieu to one of their own as we tastefully faded to white, I would have giggled like a school girl and asked how they’d manage to keep fitting numbers into the title.
Yet here we are, with Furious 7, the latest—probably last, possibly not—entry in what has proven to be a multi-billion dollar franchise with more than just good legs. In fact, from my side of the street, I’d dare say that these films aren’t just dumb fun, but also stupidly important.
Having “thoughts” on these film isn’t nearly as moot as contemporary film critics would have you believe. You don’t have to think too hard when you’re sitting and watching Vin Diesel literally lift a car, but it doesn’t hurt if you do. And feeling something isn’t that far removed from thinking about it—it stimulates equally, but from a different lane. And my mind wandered in a hundred different directions watching Furious 7, all proving surprisingly positive. Like do I love these movies? What’s happening?
The franchise is moderately mindless, sure, but there is almost no denying that it somehow matters. Not in the films’ form, but most certainly in their function. Nowhere else in Hollywood are you seeing a franchise lead almost entirely by an ethnically diverse cast, let alone a multi-billion dollar one. Even superhero movies with their characters covered from head to toe, flesh in both texture and hue entirely unseen, can’t seem to get out of the white casting pool.
Films about race are often just that: about race—either about the enduring trauma of fighting for equality or the very-special-episode-nature of tiding those same tensions. The Fast and Furious films are unique because they’re almost the exact opposite: race is their most progressive element, yet they’re largely not about it. They feature the hallmarks of a certain idealized version of it, but they’re uninterested in actually interrogating it. It’s the same thing that makes FOX’s hit Empire so captivating: if that show is about the unabashed fixtures of a certain type of blackness, Fast and Furious is similarly about the act of watching. It’s just quietly humming its motor enough for you to look and take it in; some new world order for you to observe. The film is eyecandy, but what you’re watching is sometimes more than just fast cars doing neat tricks.
It used to be that discussing race in The Fast and the Furious was to distinguish drag from street to drift; now, race is the silent lifeblood of the franchise. In its two weeks in theatres, Furious 7 has brought in a record $800 Million worldwide haul, the highest of the franchise to date. In its opening weekend, a huge 75% of ticket-buyers were non-white. When you have a record box office gross largely purchased by an underserved demographic, you have to take notice, especially when it isn’t a Tyler Perry production. In this way, race proves to exist not just in the film’s diegesis, but rather as a fundamental part of how its appeal has gone from something distinctly urban to undeniably global.
[blockquote]The Fast and Furious films are unique because while race is their most progressive element, they’re largely not about it. They feature the hallmarks of a certain idealized version of it, but they’re uninterested in actually interrogating it. The film is eyecandy, but what you’re watching is sometimes more than just fast cars doing neat tricks.”[/blockquote]
The ever-changing tides of Hollywood funding also might have something to do with that. The original Fast and the Furious—not to be confused with the fourth chapter, Fast & Furious (I want to kill myself)—was a surprise hit, bringing in a worldwide tally of $207 Million on a $38 Million budget, with a majority coming from its domestic gross. Its sequel, 2 Fast 2 Furious, hit a similar tally, but with a doubled budget it failed studio expectations. As a result, the film’s third installment, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, was originally planned as a straight-to-video release, until filmmaker Justin Lin massaged the studio with a stand-alone story that would take the film to the streets of Japan where a the titular racing fad was gaining popularity.
Here’s where things get interesting. Tokyo Drift would go on to become the lowest grossing film in the franchise, where it still remains thanks to its $158 Million gross. In comparison to the $236 Million gross of 2 Fast 2 Furious, studios would be forgiven for thinking their franchise had, for lack of a better pun, run its course. But Tokyo Drift’s DVD gross was the highest of the series by leaps and bounds. Whereas the first two films grossed about $2 Million in sales and rentals, Tokyo Drift brought in an astounding $41 Million.
In the days when Hollywood studios could re-coup entire budgets by leaning on DVD sales and rental profits, franchises were born from the ashes. This is largely what happened with films like Austin Powers, which became a hit on video, and it’s a similar democratic principal to what you’re seeing now with television on Netflix, where people can essentially vote long after the polls have closed.
Times change (“but family is forever!” screams a drunk Vin Diesel as he bursts into my room). Hollywood no longer has the luxury of leaning on the home video market as a secondary gross, thanks in large part to the fact that literally nobody buys DVDs anymore. So it’s telling that Fast and the Furious would breed a franchise at the peak of that old school model in the early 2000s, and that it would shape shift into its current iteration now in 2015. That the film’s tastes and scope have broadened has as much to do with foreign markets as it does the breadth of Hollywood imagination.
In the last few years, China has managed to become the biggest film market outside of the United States. 2013 saw China’s box office tally hit $3.6 billion, making for a 27% increase from the previous year when it jumped ahead of Japan as the largest non-North American demographic. And while the United States box office still stands tallest, with $10.3 billion, that number has actually gone down from the previous year. Meanwhile in 2014, China’s total sum hit a record high with $4.8 billion. That number still falls over 50% below America’s, but the sizable uptick has many experts predicting that China’s film market might overtake North America’s by 2025—which is in like literally five minutes.
When you see The Avengers swooping through the skyscrapers of Hong Kong, or the Transformers barreling through Beijing, there’s a bit of strategic power playing there. Consider it geo-synergy. With Hollywood more and more dependent on the foreign market to accrue for larger budgets, cinematic appeal begins to go more broadly horizontal. Nowhere has this been more apparent than in the Fast and the Furious franchise, which over its fourteen years has managed to go from the strange intimacies of a central Los Angeles street racing team to the cross-global adventures of high-speed outlaws with a passing interest in automobile craftsmanship, and finally somehow back again. This time around, China Film Group Corporation even served as a producing partner, and Furious 7 had the largest opening in the country’s history just this past week; it’s currently on track to surpass the all-time Chinese box office record.
Of course, things have been lost in the interim. By broadening the franchise, a certain type of unique specificity has been sacrificed. The sheen of hip-hop has always been fundamental to the Furious films, with editing reminiscent of a music video, and the use of video vixens on car hoods as actual narrative momentum instead of aesthetic decoration (well, almost). These films have always seemed like a strange extension of hip-hop’s culture-dominating dynasty during the new millennium. If action films were once rock-and-roll as cinema, the Fast and the Furious franchise is a definitive take on where the culture is at, in a moment when nearly everything is infused with a bit of rap culture, both watered down and pumped up.
This is to say nothing of the parade of hip-hop cameos throughout the series. By them time we reach chapter 7, they’ve become cannon, taking on the character tropes of caper films: R&B star Tyreese as the comedic relief, and Ludacris as the tech genius who’s does a lot with his clicking and clacking of keyboard keys (I guess somewhere between his role as Miami’s loudmouth mechanic, he also became a tech guru).
With the second half of the franchise, much of that preoccupied interest is gone, which might speak more to hip-hop’s culture dominating effect in the years since. Even Iggy Azalea, for all the cries of culture mining, proves to be an interestingly telling cameo, if only because it reminds you that these films can serve as unique time capsules. When you look back on it fifteen years from now, Furious 7 might really feel something like 2015, whatever that may mean.
Yet it’s the simultaneous quiet and buzz of central LA that’s most missing, the tone that placed the original film closer to the street melodramas of the late 80s and early 90s, with just a pinch of genre. In fact, it’s comical to think that the biggest action set piece of the first film is a scene where Paul Walker’s car speeds up and passes from underneath a semi truck, coming out the other side unscathed. That moment gets a call back in Furious 7, but it’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it small; a whimper in a moshpit. We’ve come so far from those days that the callback’s primary value is of nostalgia. And it has been a minute—fourteen years. A decade and a half long franchise is nothing to scoff at. And considering that it’s one of the only Hollywood tentpoles to not be adapted from a comic, a TV show, a video game or a children’s toy, props should be given where they’re deserved.
And they’re so deserved that I was genuinely misty-eyed coming out of that loud-ass theatre. For films so dripping in testosterone, the verbal and emotional bond of brotherhood displayed in the film has always made it feel like a bit of a revelation. Never have you seen a movie with this much violence and male fantasy feel so self-effacingly comfortable in its own masculinity. You could make the case for some level of homosexual underpinnings: Vin Diesel literally looks like an erection, so when he drives head first into something, it feels like the mechanical equivalent of an orgasm. It’s Paul Walker, however, who is the recipient of much of the film’s ode to male bondage (oh wow).
Posthumous performances are often projected with signs from beyond the grave. Brandon Lee playing a resurrected Johnny Depp-lite in the film roll that killed him in The Crow; Heath Ledger’s death instinct preaching Joker in The Dark Knight; and now Paul Walker, who died in a car accident in 2013. Pointing out cosmic irony is a bit of a rough play; we get it, you want to say, but there’s really no “there” there, other than to say that, yes death can strike randomly and have some dark sense of humor about it. When Walker’s Brian O’Conner cheats death multiple times in the film, it seems akin to breathing easier for a second, to rewriting some truth, but only if you want to see it that way. The better choice is to recognize that Walker has passed, and the film on some level knows it, much the same way its known everything else. When The Rock joined the franchise, along with Kurt Rusell and Jason Statham in Furious 7, the films on some level evolved to include the shared history of these actors. When you see Kurt Russell and Jason Statham face off, what you’re watching is some Escape From New York and Transporter fan fiction.
[blockquote pull=”pullleft”]It becomes about everything it’s not actually about.[/blockquote]
On that level, conscious inclusion of real life history has its way of sneaking in with Walker, and his send off reaches surprising emotional highs, with about as much subtlety as the series has previously proven capable of. Which is to say there is none, but nobody goes to these films for anything resembling tastefulness. Instead, Furious 7 reminds you of something genuine about the American ID, which is that it looks both the same and different than before. The cars and the women remain constant—their simplicity is both problematic and childishly passable—but the delivery module for both sensation and sentiment feels different. It becomes about everything it’s not actually about. Furious 7 can’t change the world, but it might help you notice that it’s changing anyway.