Vin Diesel and Paul Walker in ‘The Fast and the Furious’ (The Kobal Collection)
With hitting theaters on Friday, there’s no doubt that the Fast and the Furious
franchise has become a megabudgeted, globetrotting, star-studded,
physics-defying action juggernaut. But not many multibillion dollar
franchise has ever come from such humble origins as the Fast and the Furious movies. When the series began 14 years ago, with Rob Cohen’s 2001 The Fast and The Furious movie, it was a much more modest affair, one that hardly anticipated what it would mutate into.
So
how did the original film prove successful enough to spawn six
blockbuster sequels, each bigger and crazier than the last? And what
elements of it still run through the newer movies, even as multimillion
dollar sports cars leap between Middle Eastern skyscrapers?
Nominally inspired by a Vibe magazine article
looking at the world of New York City street-racing culture, the
finished screenplay owed as much to Kathryn Bigelow’s 1991 Keanu Reeves
and Patrick Swayze-starring action movie Point Break as it did to the magazine piece. Like that film, The Fast and the Furious,
which hit theaters on June 22, 2001, sees a cop (Paul Walker’s Brian
O’Conner) infiltrating an underground subculture (street racing instead
of surfing), to get to the bottom of a series of heists, only to form a
close bond with the charismatic perpetrator, here in the form of Vin
Diesel’s Dominic Toretto.
The beginning of a beautiful friendship (The Kobal Collection)
It’s
low-key stuff compared with the more recent entries, but that’s part of
the film’s charm. Complete with an early-noughties trailer-ready
soundtrack of nu metal and hip-hop from the likes of Limp Bizkit and
cast member Ja Rule, the movie fits into the long tradition of cinematic
youth-exploitation pictures (even the title was borrowed from a,
tapping into a culture that studio executives didn’t really understand
but were pretty sure they could make some money from. Cohen, at least,
got the appeal, saying in
that “at 16, you finally get your license. From then on, you’re free.
And you never forget that the car gave you that freedom.” Like Rebel Without a Cause and American Graffiti before it, The Fast and the Furious tapped into that feeling.
