Who remembers the Fast and the Furious Franchise, it’s been
going for a while now, so let’s get a spinoff featuring popular characters,
recipe for success?
What started as a film about street racing with the
occasional heist ramped up a few gears over the years, with more focus on the
heists and action over actual street racing. It never stopped involving cars
but the genre slowly morphed. The other thing the films did is the proverbial
jump off a ramp over a tank of sharks, and then they drove out of a building
and into another building across the street, and that I mean literally.
Yeah, the overhaul of the tone of the franchise to focus on
a tight-knit ‘family’ of individuals doing increasingly ludicrous car stunts
hasn’t gone unnoticed. Still, the numbers don’t lie and Fast 5 and onwards have
been far more successful, and that has to be attributed to the tone.
Fast 5 introduced the Rock as Luke Hobbs, an FBI agent who’s
tough as nails with a very fixed moral compass, allowing him to look past his
mission and see the greater good. On the other side we have Jason Statham as
Deckard Shaw, a mastermind that murdered Han (this apparently will be retconned
in Fast 9 because the Fast Franchise lives on comic book logic) and has had a
rivalry with Hobbs as they had to work together for a common good in Fast 8.
Both characters have a broad appeal, mostly because of the
actors playing them. And despite some behind-the-scenes controversy over this,
they were spun off into their own film, Hobbs and Shaw. The film was released
in 2019, back when the cinema wasn’t a scary dangerous place, to mixed to
positive reviews, and $750m on a $200m budget, can’t really say fairer than
that.
In the director’s chair we have David Leich, who we last saw
as the director of Deadpool 2, and writing we have Chris Morgan, who’s been
writing for the franchise since Tokyo Drift. I’d say these are relatively safe
hands, so let’s see if I’m right.
