Fast & Furious (2009)
Directed by Justin Lin
When a crime brings them back to L.A., fugitive ex-con Dom Toretto reignites his feud with agent Brian O'Conner. But as they are forced to confront a shared enemy, Dom and Brian must give in to an uncertain new trust if they hope to outmaneuver him. And the two men will find the best way to get revenge: push the limits of what's possible behind the wheel.
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What critics compared Fast & Furious to
It isn’t about hopped-up racers as in the gimmicky Fast & Furious franchise, or cars that suddenly and disconcertingly climb walls like The Transporter.
The cast doesn’t have the sassy swagger of the “Fast & Furious” crew.
“Need for Speed” makes the “Fast & Furious” films look ready for the dean’s list and is strictly for those who don’t mind sitting though a 130-minute Mustang ad and paying extra to see it in 3-D.
Need for Speed, I’ve seen all the Fast & Furious films.
Tobey’s pit crew mirrors the tokenistic ethnic diversity of Fast & Furious — the black guy (Mescudi), the Hispanic guy (Ramon Rodriguez), the Arab guy (Rami Malek) and the cute blond dead Pete (Australia’s Harrison Gilbertson) — each with one quirk, none with distinctive appeal.
Oh yeah, Bad Boys for Life is straight up copping the Fast & Furious formula (complete with their own #JusticeForHan storyline).
Sure, they're copping licks from John Wick, Mission Impossible, Fast & Furious, and Fury Road left and right, but they're having a good time doing it.
Action movies now belong to long-running franchises like Fast & Furious and Mission: Impossible , a PG-13 landscape where characters are borderline superheroes.
Bad Boys for Life doesn't manage to follow in Fast & Furious' footsteps and reinvent an older action franchise for an era where superheroes and world-building reign supreme, yet it proves there's still room for two everyman Miami detectives who're just trying to make the world a better place.
The brand of over-the-top action that Michael Bay’s films once provided have been usurped by the Fast & Furious and John Wicks of the world.
Following a former army captain and a small family surviving in Incheon, Peninsula combines components from I Am Legend , Mad Max , and the Fast & Furious series for a nonsensical joy ride that, while entertaining, lacks the sharpness of its predecessor.
At times it recalls two different “Mad Max” films (“The Road Warrior” and “Fury Road”), George A. Romero’s zombie sequel “Land of the Dead,” and, refreshingly, the “Fast & Furious” movies.
The older one drives like Vin Diesel in a Fast & Furious movie, while the younger one uses a light-filled remote control car to draw zombies away.
Sorry not sorry for the hyperbole, but Peninsula is Land Of The Dead , Mad Max: Fury Road , World War Z , all mixed in a blender with Fast & Furious franchise DNA (the later sequels).
Then there’s the Fury Road-inspired car chases through the streets of Incheon that feel like the natural next step for the Fast & Furious franchise (forget about going to space, Toretto and the family should fight a zombie outbreak next).
Where the first film was a character-driven horror drama that deftly threaded tension and thrills into its narrative at appropriate points, Peninsula is an action-horror sequel by way of World War Z or Fast & Furious, trading three-dimensional characters for more chaotic, wide-scale action that suffers from an overreliance on poorly realized CGI.
However, if you’re going to hate on “family” as a theme in Avatar: The Way of Water, then you have to extend your disdain to every Fast & Furious movie, two Incredibles movies from Pixar, and, heck, even The Godfather trilogy among many more rock-solid films that celebrate and emphasize family love for dramatic hold.
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The cinematography by Anthony Dod Mantle (“Slumdog Millionaire”) never goes for those adrenaline-charged images that inspire other racing movies from “Grand Prix” and “Le Mans” to the “Fast & Furious” series.
The plot lacks the grease-stained poetry of better gearhead clashes (such as the extraordinary 2010 documentary Senna ); cynically, Rush seems to be courting a video-game crowd impatient for another CGI-heavy Fast & Furious.
Well, Hollywood has been giving us its version of this story for years now, and it’s called Fast & Furious.
Bathed in warm cinematography—almost identical to that used in Howard's underrated genre bender The Dilemma (2011)—and making unexpected use of avant-garde framing techniques, it's easily his most visually ambitious work to date, though the computer-generated race scenes pale in comparison to Justin Lin’s pulsating Fast & Furious films.
Sonic is produced by Neal H. Moritz, whose Original Film banner helped create Fast & Furious , 21 Jump Street , xXx and the TV series Prison Break.
More like sequences where Sonic shellshocks a turtle by letting him “burn rubber” for once, or pop culture references to Fast & Furious movies, or the film’s bountiful Olive Garden references (seriously, that product placement probably paid for Sonic 2.0).
Uncharted doesn’t exactly chart a new territory in the action adventure genre, in fact it’s basically a variation of the franchise movies I’ve mentioned, combined with the preposterousness of the Fast & Furious flicks.
The “Fast & Furious” films are probably to blame, or thank, for the propensity of today’s action films to stretch toward increasingly absurd heights.
With a pair of bejeweled crucifixes literally symbolizing all the double-crossing that transpires along this convoluted journey, Nathan and Sully get into all sorts of death-defying, CGI-requiring, green-screen-heavy adventures, ranging from the slick and relatively grounded to airborne stuff straight out of one of the more ludicrous (or should we say Ludacris) “Fast & Furious” adventures.
Set pieces are so hectic and slathered in CGI that you’d eventually trade a Spanish galleon full of gold for a single clear wide shot, which is all the more frustrating because the film’s small handful of action sequences are conceived with more imagination than any recent “Fast & Furious” movie has been able to muster.
And knowing that audiences are now all too ready to accept gravity-defying, belief-suspended set-pieces, Fleischer has crafted some ridiculously entertaining spectacles within that more than owe their execution to the gradual insanity of the Fast & Furious series; the climactic sequence which features pirate ships being carried over oceans and throughout island structures by attached helicopters is truly a wild ride.
Yet here, for all the money hosed into the production, there’s a surprising lack of zest, even an uncertainty about tone, going from National Treasure to Fast & Furious in the blink of an edit.
The bare bones of the plot definitely possess the potential to deliver a strikingly original globetrotting epic, but the final product feels like an undercooked and underwritten slog that echoes superior films like Inception , The Matrix , Netflix’s The Old Guard and even the Fast & Furious franchise, and Infinite doesn’t bring anything to the table that either action or sci-fi fans haven’t seen done before, and much better.
The high-speed, Fast & Furious -style opening takes place in the Mexican capital in “The Last Life.”
And chase it they do, in a fun highway romp through Mexico City that rivals a Fast & Furious movie, but the film isn’t about any of the people we meet in this opening scene.
Fuqua and Wahlberg have both proven themselves elsewhere, but here their overall disinterest is almost palpable as the former auditions for a Fast & Furious gig while the latter sleepwalks through the entire film.
A little Mission: Impossible here, a little Fast & Furious there, a sword fight on a tumbling aircraft, a car chase through a police station (which sounds cooler than it plays).
Sure, these lucky souls could be writing symphonies or curing cancer, but it’s more exciting to watch Wahlberg ride a motorcycle off a cliff and land on the wing of a low-flying cargo plane — a plausibility-bending stunt not even the “Fast & Furious” franchise would dare.
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Like the Fast & Furious franchise and the Avengers movies and every other modern series, it’s a movie about family, as long as that family is constantly devising new reasons for things (and people) to blow up.
6 Underground is a whirlwind collision of the Ocean’s heist films, the Fast & Furious franchise, the Mission: Impossible series, Vin Diesel’s XXX saga, and The A-Team.
Before the Fast & Furious series cornered the market for ludicrous action sequences, Bay was the go-to guy for outrageous stunts – and he delivers again here.
Clearly wanting to show that there would be no Fast & Furious films, arguably the new heir to his throne, without the road Bay paved, 6 Underground announces its swagger from its lengthy opening car chase.
You've made some enjoyable ones over the years -- the first "Transformers," "Bad Boys" -- but "6 Underground," a non-stop stunt reel with a few, admittedly impressive displays of your usual visual verve -- is just "Fast & Furious" crossed with an old Whitesnake music video, but with fewer functioning brain cells.
The apparent goal was to make an action film for people who find "Fast & Furious" movies too heavily plotted, only to create what feels like a bad Michael Bay-directed parody of a Michael Bay movie.
A respectful and respectable update of the Mad Max mythos would probably still have been received as a much-needed corrective to the unbearable lightness of superhero movies, the way even perfectly OK Fast & Furious sequels usually are.
As far as cars are concerned (start getting nervous, “Fast & Furious”), this new world is open for speculation.
And when it comes to velocitised vehicular mayhem, the Fast & Furious franchise and its ilk are left hopelessly stalled in the dust.
This franchise was quick and angry before Fast & Furious was even a gleam in Vin Diesel’s eye, but even after a 30-year layoff, it still feels cutting-edge.
But even that lo-fi, high-impact classic now looks like a mere sketch for the long-under-construction Mad Max: Fury Road, a kinetic, hallucinatory, boldly feminist chase flick that, with its vibrant color palette, harrowing stunt work and show-don't-tell style of yarn-spinning, leaves every Marvel movie and every Fast & Furious in its irradiated dust.
This is the kind of film that the Fast & Furious franchise wishes it could one day become.