Series Overview:
A teaser at the end of Furious 6 replayed the crash that killed Han in Tokyo Drift, only to reveal that the car he ran into was not a random passer-by, but a dangerous assassin played by none other than The Only Living Badass Jason Statham (playing himself).
I adore how the Fast & Furious series just constantly goes for broke, increasingly eschewing logic and physics with a gleeful enthusiasm. The first film was an honest-to-goodness B-movie with chases and interesting characters. I appreciate its appeal, but I would never have thought the filmmakers would have had the courage to ratchet everything up they way they did. Imagine if every series did this. If they started modest, and just kept getting bigger and bigger. Imagine if Alien turned into Aliens, and Aliens turned into Alien: Hell Planet of the XenoKing. And then turned into Too Many Aliens!: Invasion Jupiter.
And there’s integrity to this. Don’t allow the story to mount naturally. Push it. Force it around corners. Inflate it into something exciting and big. It’s so rare that “bigger” translates to “better” in the world of sequels, but Fast & Furious is the one shining example of how it worked. How modesty turned into obscene overblown silliness, and the films somehow got better.
Will Furious 7 ever get made? Upon my last check, it’s still on the fence. The sad death of Paul Walker has put the future of the series into doubt, and the production of Furious 7 was put on hiatus, resurrected, put on hiatus again, and might be back in the screenwriting phase. I think the producers will continue the series. The outpouring of good will for Paul Walker was larger than anyone could have predicted, and the affection for the Fast & Furious series is still at an enormous clip. Making a seventh film would be a fitting tribute to Walker, even if it is sloppy, dumb, and writes out O’Connor halfway through.
I’ll see it.
Witney Seibold is the head film critic for Nerdist, and a contributor on the CraveOnline Film Channel, and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. You can read his weekly articles Trolling, Free Film School and The Series Project, and follow him on “Twitter” at @WitneySeibold, where he is slowly losing his mind.
