Fast & Furious - What's Your Code?
With the fourth installment in the Fast franchise we have our first, real sequel. The two previous movies kept the series name alive, but Fast & Furious made double what box office experts predicted, and more in its opening weekend than Tokyo Drift did in its entire domestic run. For whatever reason, audiences wanted this movie. And for reasons that will become clear as we go on, they liked what they saw.
By this point there had been attempts to copy the formula, with movies like Torque in 2004 and Stealth in 2005, which replaced cars with motorcycles and jets, respectively. Neither of those movies is on its tenth sequel. Something was missing. So once again I’m going to attempt to get to the heart of what makes these car movies have legs, and what storytellers can learn from stupid (and stupid successful) movies.
Fast & Furious, as with most movies, opens with our characters in their ordinary worlds. Vin Diesel is back as Domic Toretto, whose everyday life is high speed heists (obviously!). As always, he’s behind the wheel of a car which he handles like an extension of his own body. He’s gathered around him a new crew and reconnected with the love of his life, Letty (Michelle Rodriguez). In the opening moments, as cars and a gasoline tanker race down a twisting mountain road, where things go wrong and explode, we’re reintroduced to the characters. But more than that, Dom’s devotion to Letty, which was barely touched on before, is more firmly established. During a thrilling action sequence.
Show, don’t tell.
Later, in a quieter moment, their love is reinforced through exposition that also sets up the plot, and in Dom’s quietly leaving in the night. He’s a wanted man, and he wants Letty to have a chance at a normal life. Again, because he cares for her. Same idea, expressed in two different ways, both of which tell us something about the characters without actually telling us.
Brian O’Connor (Paul Walker) lives in a radically different world now. Somehow his Dukes of Hazzard hijinks in Miami earned him a nice suit and a job with the FBI. He even looks more mature, less white bread and more world weary, even when he’s not in a suit and tie. More significant to his reintroduction is that he’s not driving. No, the man is running in a way that even Tom Cruise would respect. Alone, without a crew or even a sidekick, O’Connor is still trying to find himself and figure out where he belongs.
Fast & Furious is easily the darkest movie in the series, not just because it’s a murder mystery and revenge tale. Dom feels betrayed by Brian, at one point snarling, “You weren’t anybody’s friend.” On top of that, they both want to find the same man and bring him to justice, but for different reasons, and in different ways that constantly bring them back into conflict. Their simmering animosity means less playful banter, but it also results in a more complicated dynamic, and thus a better story.
This is in sharp contrast to 2 Fast 2 Furious, where Roman forgives Brian after a quick fistfight, and Brian has no internal struggle. It’s also an improvement over Tokyo Drift, where Sean had nothing to lose if he never reached his goals. Here, stakes are set high and certain conflicts, though uncomfortable, are allowed to play out.
“Maybe you’re lying to yourself,” Mia (Jordanna Brewster) tells Brian. “Maybe you’re not the good guy pretending to be the bad guy. Maybe you’re the bad guy pretending to be the good guy. Did you ever think about that?”
“Every day,” he answers.
Good storytelling doesn’t give us everything at once, but builds layers on layers. Great storytelling finds every opportunity to reveal more about the characters and who they are. The love interest forces the hero to see something in himself. So even though Brian and Mia aren’t together anymore, her character still serves that purpose and this moment subtly tells us that their relationship isn’t over yet.
Sometimes it’s okay to tell. Just hide it as best you can.
Brian and Mia have a second conversation, a bookend to the earlier moment. “You asked me why I let Dom go,” Brian says. “I did it, because at that moment, I respected him more than I did myself. One thing I’ve learned from Dom is that nothing really matters unless you have a code.”
Mia asks, “And what’s your code?”
“I’m working on it.”
Brian once asked Dom if he was worthy. While he came into his own as a driver and momentarily found a place in the Family, something was missing. Anywhere else in the script this talk of personal codes of honor would be too on the nose, but it works here because it comes shortly after the dinner ritual (first person to take food has to say grace) and in a relaxed moment when we do tend to be more open, vulnerable, and say things we wouldn’t normally say.
It’s worth noting that director Justin Lin and screenwriter Chris Morgan, who both started with Tokyo Drift, are back even though their movie was practically unrelated. Whatever missteps they made before, they now clearly understand what made the first movie work.
Not to belabor the point, but the themes of Family, Worth, Ritual, and a Code are what set the Fast movies apart. They resonate with us (especially men, the target audience) just as much here as they do in, say, Authurian legends. But instead of knights in shining armor, we have dudes in shining 10-second cars. At some point the people working on these movies may have thought they were about street racing culture from around the world. But it wasn’t until the focus shifted to universal values that it started running on all cylinders.
