Almost 20 years on from the first installment, and it would be an understatement to say that the Fast & Furious franchise has come a long way from rather humble origins as a B-level series of movies focused on street racing. The fourth entry may have started the shift towards action-heavy territory, but it was 2011’s Fast Five that definitively reinvented the brand as a blockbuster behemoth that threw logic and physics out of the window in an aim to create bigger and more outlandish crowd-pleasing set-pieces with each new installment.
To put things into perspective, the first movie’s most notable action beat saw two cars narrowly avoid getting hit by an oncoming train, whereas the most recent installment featured Dominic Toretto and his crew destroying a gigantic submarine during a battle with a mercenary army on a frozen Russian lake to prevent a nuclear war, with Dwayne Johnson diverting live torpedoes with his bare hands for good measure.
That kind of insanity is what fans have come to expect from Fast and Furious, and based on the recently-released first trailer for F9, they certainly won’t be disappointed when the latest entry in The Fast Saga drops this summer. After all, the entire appeal of the brand is to deliver these kinds of jaw-dropping moments, and even star Michelle Rodriguez admits that you’d best not over-think the logistics of the action.
“Let’s just say you’re gonna question a lot in this movie when it comes to physics. You’re just going to have to be like, ‘Wait, what?’. Let’s just say there’s a lot of that in this one. For some stunts, they basically put a car at the end of an apparatus and spin you around and make you throw up. It’s one of the tools needed to do some of the crazier stunts. Most of it is special effects these days, and stunt doubles because of insurance, but the fighting sequences are always my favorite.”
The last two Fast movies have made over a billion dollars each at the box office, and Fast & Furious 9 seems like a virtual guarantee to follow suit and become one of the biggest hits of 2020. If the franchise continues to raise the bar like it’s done for the last decade, then surely the only fitting way to wrap up the series with the tenth installment is to deliver the ultimate wish-fulfillment for fans and send the gang into space for their big sendoff.