‘Fast & Furious’ Couldn’t Keep Driving Like This

Every franchise, if allowed to go on long enough, hits a wall sooner or later. Nothing lasts forever, as they say, and we’ve seen this eventuality come sooner or later in different flavors.

But not many have hit the wall quite like Fast & Furious. One of the biggest, stupidest Hollywood franchises around is now slated to end its main run of movies in April 2027 with Fast XI. It’s an end that can’t come soon enough, honestly. Fast X’s biggest crime wasn’t being half a movie—though of summer 2023’s trio of half-movies, it was easily the worst of the bunch—but how much it confirmed the series’ fumes had finally diminished.

The question of where this series goes has always hung around post-Furious 7, which only felt conclusive because it suddenly had to be retooled as a farewell to the late Paul Walker and his character, Brian O’Connor. The writers for these characters likely weren’t thinking long-term prior to Walker’s passing, so it’s impossible to know how this franchise would’ve gone on otherwise.

For better or worse, Brian was an anchor being (ugh) for Fast & Furious, and things have fallen apart without him. The sequels have tried to position different characters to fill that void, but the attempted candidates—Little Nobody in Fate of the Furious, Dom’s brother Jakob in F9, and ex-Fast baddies Luke Hobbs and Deckard Shaw—are either too green or too experienced to really settle in with the other characters, who’ve all been playing the same notes throughout the Fast saga.

People have never really been these movies’ strong suit, but it’s increasingly felt like the cast is on autopilot until it’s time for a car scene or stunt, not helped by the gradual pivot from an ensemble piece to “The Dom Toretto Show (and Friends)” and increasingly dubious character swerves. (Vin Diesel’s refusal to share the spotlight with anyone else may be the franchise’s biggest flaw, and if you don’t believe me, go watch Dungeons & Dragons to see how much more awake Michelle Rodriguez is compared to these movies. Actually, go watch that anyways because it’s great.)

Such nonsense can be forgiven in, say, Mission: Impossible, but those movies have smaller casts and generally employ more restraint. In the past, Fast embracing idiocy made for a fun spectacle; watching the final act of Furious 6 in theaters with a crowd was a deliriously good time. But stunt-wise, the series might’ve peaked with Seven or Fate, something the creative forces seem to have finally admitted to themselves.

On its face, Diesel’s promise of Fast XI being set in LA and returning to the car culture and street antics of the first film isn’t a bad thing and may even result in some more inventive set pieces now that they have to rein themselves back in. It’ll just always be funny how the series’ next escalation is a de-escalation that’ll have to skirt by its last movie’s cliffhanger ending and hope Dwayne Jonshon and Jason Momoa’s purported double act can help square that circle when or if the time comes.

Come April 2027, I will likely be there in the theaters watching Fast XI with everyone else to see how things end. The series has enough good entries under its belt to warrant seeing it through to the end and seeing the inevitably messy way they bring Brian back into the fold. I just wish it were going out on better terms after all the goodwill it’d built up with its middle entries. But we got Brazil and the longest airport runway in the world, so at least there’s that.

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