Fast & Furious (also known as Fast & Furious 4) is a 2009 American street racing action film directed by Justin Lin and written by Chris Morgan. It is the fourth installment of The Fast and the Furious franchise. The film stars Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Michelle Rodriguez, Jordana Brewster and John Ortiz. The beginning of the Fast & Furious trilogy, Fast & Furious serves as a direct sequel to the first film and is set five years after the events of The Fast and the Furious, with the original cast reprising their roles.
Originally released on April 3, 2009, the film received negative reviews upon release, but was a box office success grossing $363 million worldwide. Diesel was hoping to make more films in the Riddick franchise of sci-fi action pictures. To do that, though, he needed to get the rights for the character from Universal, which also produced the Fast & Furious movies. He agreed to cameo at the end of Tokyo Drift — as a promise of his return to the franchise in a fourth film — but instead of payment, he asked for the Riddick rights. Universal obliged, and another Riddick movie came out in 2013.
But as fun as "Hobbs and Shaw" is, the film is weighed down a bit by venturing into the sci-fi genre. Idris Elba is a great addition as a villain, but the idea of a cybergenetically enhanced superhuman who, along with an evil global organization, trying to destroy the human race is a bit silly. He feels like a "Terminator" or Superman villain and you just can't help but wonder what movie you're watching at times. After all, this franchise started with illegal street racing. The movie has little to do with family as it becomes a huge revenge film for him when he hears his wife Letty has been "killed." (In great soap-opera fashion, she returns from the dead two films later). The most ridiculous scene of the movie may be when Dom goes to the crash site where Letty supposedly died and amazingly can decipher and see exactly how she was killed.
Dom may be a car mechanic, but he's definitely not Batman. Fast & Furious was theatrically released worldwide by Universal Pictures on April 3, 2009, and was the first to feature D-BOX motion feedback technology. The film received mixed reviews with praise for reuniting the original cast and the action sequences, but criticism for its writing. It grossed over $360 million worldwide, subverting expectations to become the then-highest-grossing film in the franchise, and the 17th highest-grossing film of 2009. It also grossed $70.9 million worldwide during its opening weekend, the then-highest grossing worldwide spring weekend opening of all time, until the release of Alice in Wonderland . Not much is left to say about this movie aside from the cars.
The plot is primitive, but stronger than the storyline of the previous three films of the franchise 's it delivers at least a fair amount of brilliant action sequences. To like this movie, you have to like at least one of the two main themes in the film 's racing cars or hot girls. This apparently forms a big enough group to make "The Fast and the Furious" one of the most commercially successful films of the year in just one weekend. Justin Lin was never going to top "Fast Five," and it's kind of a shame that he even tried. The eight-movie, 16-year history of the "Fast and the Furious" franchise is nothing less than the story of Hollywood filmmaking in the 21st century. No other series in recent memory has taken so many sharp turns over the years, and no other series has been able to survive so many flat tires thanks to the sheer power of family.
Before the fourth film, this is basically the Halloween franchise — three films, where the third has essentially no connection to the first two other than genre. With the fourth, though, the films accidentally become, thanks to the addition of Han to the main cast, a shared universe, where all of the characters are involved in one another's adventures — and they get there a few years before Marvel would. Along the way, they also make a stop in "the bad guys are good guys now!" territory, straight out of the Terminator movies. For the first four films, this is a franchise about car racing and big chase sequences, with those elements mixing into fairly standard crime thriller plots.
In Fast Five, however, the franchise takes a hard right turn into the heist movie genre, with only one car chase. And Fast & Furious 6 is much closer to a James Bond movie than anything else, with the characters having to take down a villain who could destroy the world. The franchise always prominently features cars, and the solution to every problem is always "more cars," but these aren't "car movies" anymore. This is ultimately the most forgettable of the Fast films.
It's not the worst, it's not even that bad, but the fact is every time I see it there's only a handful of parts I end up remembering from it. Racing through the tunnels is cool, Dom's quest for revenge has power, and the confrontation boiling into brotherhood between him and Brian is interesting. That being said, the actual plot is weirdly convoluted with a villain who's just not that interesting, and there's a surprising amount of down time.
I'm not opposed to drama in these movies, but in this case it's just not handled that well and can get a little boring. It was meant to bridge the gap between the Fast movies as street racing films to action heist films, and it ultimately accomplishes that. If you're doing a marathon of the films it's narratively important, but it's not one that I feel the need to go back to for any other reason. Han was introduced in the third film, Tokyo Drift, as a wise mentor figure for that film's lead; Han also died in Tokyo Drift.
But that film's final scene made it clear that Han had, once upon a time, run with Vin Diesel's Dominic Toretto. Weirdly, the three films that followed Tokyo Drift all wound up exploring that "once upon a time" period. In the fourth film, Fast & Furious, Han was alive again — although he mentioned that he was planning to move to Tokyo. In the first film, Mia catches Brian's eye as he's working undercover on a case involving a series of truck hijackings. Throughout the film, Mia shows her worth and proves she is more than capable behind the wheel. However, Mia doesn't participate in any action sequences in the fourth film and is curiously relegated to dialogue-heavy scenes with Brian and others.
Though there are plenty of computer-assisted visual effects throughout the series, the franchise attempts to actually perform as many stunts as it can. This means that when the cars crash, some stunt driver really crashed a car. It underlines the verisimilitude of much of what happens onscreen, no matter how ridiculous.
This is really happening to these characters in our universe, it seems to say, not in some fantastical one. As mentioned above, Tokyo Drift has nothing to do with either of the two movies preceding it, but audiences sparked to the character of Han, who trains Sean in the ways of drift racing. (Drift racing involves sliding around a curve, seemingly perpendicular to the road, in a way that seems almost magical when done well.) In the course of that film, Han dies after a race. At the film's end, when Sean has taken the title of Drift King, he is challenged by a new racer — who turns out to be Dom, who says Han used to ride with his crew back in the day.
Released the same year as The Final Destination , the fourth film in another franchise, whose title is also almost identical to the tile of the first film, omitting any number or subtitle. Coincidentally, the second, third, and fifth films of both series have also been released in the same years. The central cast is rounded out by Sung Kang as Han Lue, Dominic's right-hand man, while Puerto Rican singers Tego Calderón and Don Omar feature as Leo and Santos respectively, members of the oil heist team. Shea Whigham plays Brian's snarky colleague Michael Stasiak, and Liza Lapira portrays Sophie Trinh, an FBI agent who works closely with Brian. Jack Conley features as Penning, Brian's boss, and Ron Yuan acts as David Park, a scout of street racers for Braga. Greg Cipes, Neil Brown Jr., and Brandon T. Jackson play Dwight Mueller, Malik Herzon, and Alex, respectively, the other members of Braga's street racing team.
Drive iconic cars, along with new and classic vehicles, all curated with Dennis McCarthy, the official Fast & Furious car coordinator. Fire on all cylinders for high-speed action, heists, and blockbuster set pieces. Go on thrilling adventures across the globe — from the hot sands of Morocco and the glitz of Athens and Barcelona to the neon-lit streets of New Orleans. Deploy familiar gadgets from the movies and explore new ones to take down the enemy.
That being said, the real secret to "Fast Five" is how every character manages to make the whole cast feel like more of a family. "The family just got bigger" Dom says when he learns that Mia is pregnant, but no one knew just how much bigger the family was about to get. Opening with the steely, straight-faced gravitas of a Christopher Nolan movie before settling into a hyper-violent riff on "Ocean's Eleven," "Fast Five" is the one shining moment where everything came together. Fast & Furious 6' is an American action movie, released in theaters in the US in 2013. This is the sixth film in the 'Fast & Furious' franchise, which is a sequel to 'Fast Five 2011'. F9 star Jordana Brewster was disappointed with Fast & Furious 4 because she felt her character was underutilized.
Brewster has been a staple of the popular franchise from the very beginning. She debuted Dominic Toretto's sister Mia twenty years ago in The Fast and the Furious, the franchise's inaugural installment. Brewster didn't appear in the following two films and then reappeared in the fourth, titled Fast & Furious.
She will now be starring in the franchise's latest installment, F9, which will mark the first time she shares a scene with longtime co-star Michelle Rodriguez. But the real surprise of "Fate" is that it isn't the film's big action sequences that are most memorable. It's the villain from the last film, Deckard Shaw , who really steals the show in not one, but two big fight scenes that left fans wanting more. His banter with his mother, played by a no-nonsense Helen Mirren, is icing on the cake. For eight films, we've always heard about how Dom went to jail after his father died. Here, the franchise finally dives deep into the character's past to introduce a brother we never knew Dom had.
For fans who have struggled with an estranged family member, it's immensely relatable. Two emotional nods to Paul Walker's character also earn this film some points. Honestly, the best thing the fourth film does is set up the next few films in the series. If you've seen the fourth Fast and Furious movie, you'll probably remember the opening scene, where a handful of the main characters attempt to steal from a tanker truck. During the chase, Dominic Toretto spins his car around and begins to drive in reverse, while maintaining a high speed, up until the dramatic explosion at the end. Dom's wife and partner in crime, Letty was killed at the beginning of the fourth film, "Fast & Furious" , after she ran afoul of a master criminal.
In "Fast & Furious 6" , however, she was revealed to have survived the murder attempt after all — though with a serious case of mind-wiping amnesia, which caused her, temporarily, to team up with the bad guys. She saw the error of her ways at the end of that movie, and she's been back with Dom and company ever since. The original series hero, Brian was a cop going undercover as a street racer to bust Dom and his crew of hijackers. When it came time to make the arrest, Brian chose to let Dom get away, and the two have been like brothers ever since.
Paul Walker died in an automobile accident in 2013, but rather than kill him off, the films wrote Brian into peaceful retirement. He was last seen in the closing moments of "Furious 7" literally riding off into the sunset. The heart of the series, Dom's a world-weary, Corona-drinking street racer and car hijacker with an obsessive devotion to his family and a fraught relationship to the law. He first appeared in "The Fast and the Furious" as a small-time Los Angeles crook with a heart of gold, and has gradually evolved to become a sort of freelance secret agent and globe-trotting supercop. In "The Fate of the Furious" , it was revealed that he had an infant son.
Brewster kicked off her run as Dom's sister Mia in 2001 with the release of The Fast and the Furious. She catches Brian's eye while he's undercover trying to crack a case involving truck hijackings. The film offers loads of proof that Mia can handle herself behind the wheel and in the midst of tense action set pieces, but when the fourth film, Fast & Furious, came along, Mia was sidelined from the action and relegated to dialogue heavy scenes only. "Fast & Furious" is exactly and precisely what you'd expect. You get your cars that are fast and your characters that are furious.
Producer Neil Moritz is on his fourth, and director Justin Lin on his second. Vin Diesel and other major actors are back from "The Fast and the Furious" . Okay, it's not Marvel levels of deep, but the MCU has decades of comic books propping it up.
And from the fourth Furious movie on, the story of the franchise has been one story, which slowly builds on previously established character relationships and plot twists. The 1955 film — produced by famed low-budget Hollywood maven Roger Corman — was about a criminal who breaks out of prison and has to drive really fast to stay ahead of the law with a beautiful woman at his side. Elements of that idea have been sprinkled throughout the series, but no single film in the franchise is a remake of that movie. However, Universal did buy the rights to use the title for the first film. Vin Diesel originally wanted to make the fourth and fifth films back to back, but Universal decided to take some time to see how the current movie would work out before moving on to a fifth. Diesel was allowed to direct an eighteen minute short film set in the Fast And Furious world, which is available on the DVD.
Brian selects a modified 2002 Nissan Skyline GT-R R34 from the Impound Lot. Gisele Yashar, the liaison for Braga, reveals that the winner will become the last driver on a team that traffics heroin between the Mexico–United States border. Dominic wins by bumping Brian's car while it is in nitro, making him lose control.
Brian uses his power as an F.B.I. agent to frame and arrest another driver, Dwight Mueller, and takes his place on the team. Meanwhile, FBI agent Brian O'Conner is trying to track down a Mexican drug lord, Arturo Braga. His search leads him to David Park, and he tracks him down using an illegal modification record on his car.
Dom arrives at Park's apartment first and hangs him out of the window by his ankles before Brian arrives. Brian saves Park and Park becomes the FBI's new informant. Brian selects a 2002 Nissan Skyline GT-R R34 from the impound lot, which he modifies with parts from another Skyline and a 2007 Nissan GT-R. Dom modifies his 1970 Chevrolet Chevelle SS for the race. Ramon Campos, Braga's second in command and Gisele Yashar, Braga's liaison reveal that the winner will become the last driver on a team that traffics heroin between the Mexico–United States border. Dom wins by bumping Brian's car while it is in nitro, making him lose control.
Brian uses his power as an FBI agent to arrest another driver, Dwight Mueller, and takes his place on the team. "The Fast and the Furious" reunites the cast from the very first film of the series, including Vin Diesel . It revives Michelle Rodriguez from the land of forgotten stars, only for her character Letty Ortiz, Dom's girlfriend, to be killed in the beginning. If you like fast cars and reckless races, this is the film for you.
"The Fast and the Furious" saga is back for the fourth time. Maybe this is the reason everything in this film seems so familiar. The latest instalment features the same actors, the same plot, and the same L.A. The Fast & Furious franchise doesn't engage in too much narrative trickery.
The plots are straightforward — and by straightforward, I mean there are cars and people who drive those cars and those people use their cars to fight other people in cars. But there's a surprisingly complicated aspect of the films' chronology, and that aspect is the character Han, played by actor Sung Kang. The car world is still recovering from Paul Walker's untimely and unfortunate death late last year, but love for the Fast & Furious franchise--and especially its modified cars--has never been stronger.
As the next movie, Fast & Furious 7, moves onward, some lucky collector will get to take a look back at the R34 Nissan GT-R Walker drove in the fourth F&F film. Cars parachuting out of airplanes, people driving between Middle Eastern skyscrapers, The Rock flexing his way out of a cast, Kurt Russell slicking his hair all the way back… "Furious 7" truly has everything, and that proves to be way too much . The movie is wall-to-wall full of the cartoon craziness that fans supposedly want to see, but its flair for the absurd doesn't always sit well with the family-driven revenge plot that keeps the story tethered to the series' roots.
