The plots were no longer borrowed from police procedurals but from spy capers and superhero epics. The erstwhile gang of small-time crooks became an elite team of indestructible, globe-trotting mercenaries who battled cyberterrorists and raced submarines: in “Fast & Furious 9” two characters drive a rocket-fuelled car into space. “Fast & Furious 5” (2011) was an international heist movie, and from then on, the films’ budgets and profits rose each time, while their plausibility veered in the opposite direction. It sold enough tickets to justify a further sequel, but the producers steered away from yet more stories of cops and hot-rodders. A fourth film, “Fast & Furious” (2009), reunited the stars of the first one, including Ms Rodriguez and Ms Brewster. In fact, it was having a pit stop before roaring back onto the road. It looked as if the franchise had coasted across the finish line without any petrol left in the tank.
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Neither actor was in the third instalment, “The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift” (2006), until Mr Diesel turned up at the end for a smirking surprise cameo. (Jordana Brewster and Michelle Rodriguez had little to do as the men’s love interests.) Mr Diesel declined to appear in the sequel, “2 Fast 2 Furious” (2003), leaving the less charismatic Walker as the de facto star. The franchise got into gear in 2001 with “The Fast and the Furious”, a relatively gritty, small-scale thriller about an undercover LAPD detective (Paul Walker) who infiltrates a gang of illegal street racers led by a gruff alpha male, Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel).
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“Fast & Furious” films now come out more regularly than James Bond or “Mission: Impossible” ones, but they match them in scale-and beat them in box-office takings.Īn unusual feature is that they are not adapted from a comic or an old television series-a claim which could be made for numerous blockbusters in the 1980s and 1990s, but for hardly any since then. However you do the arithmetic, these absurdly macho, petrolheaded guilty pleasures add up to one of Hollywood’s most remarkable success stories. In Britain the film is called “Fast & Furious 9”, and in America it has the snazzier title of “F9: The Fast Saga”, because one entry, “Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw”, is counted as a spin-off rather than a direct sequel.
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#Fast and furious series
THE TENTH instalment in the “Fast & Furious” series is released, almost to the day, on the 20th anniversary of the first.