Fast and Furious: Stupid Brilliant Distraction

I live by distraction. Those of you who know me know I’m about five minutes from cracking up at any time. So…distractions. It’s hard to get much done in those 4 min and 59 seconds, but it lets me survive. But good distractions are hard to come by. Most things don’t work But movie do (now, anyway), but not any movie. Not most movies. Dramas don’t for the most part. Comedies are iffy. But light action/adventure—that’s the ticket. But there aren’t that many and I know too many by heart. I needed some I hadn’t seen to get me through this week. And the trailers for the Fast & Furious 8 made me look into that franchise.

Eugie and I had watched the first and didn’t hate it, but didn’t think much of it either. But I gathered things changed with the 5th film when they gave up street racing (which is really dull) and took up international fantasy capers. So I tried the 5th, and yup, it was pretty much the perfect distraction. So was the 6th and 7th. Now I need about fifteen more, but hey, I was happy to find three.

And damn those are some stupid brilliant films. Scene after scene is stupid. Not a little stupid. Mind bogglingly stupid. I thought the Casino Royale car flip was the dumbest, physics defying thing I’d seen in a film pretending that things were possible—that was before I saw the bus flip over a car in F&F 5. Nothing makes sense and the rules of the world do not apply. Friction on a safe? Nah. Also inertia is non-functional. I like how if the car hit another car, it would slow them down, but if the thing they were dragging hit another car, that other car would be destroyed and they wouldn’t slow down. Cool. The Rock just breaks off his cast and picks up mini-gun. Yes…because that could happen. People just appear in places. And half their problems would go away if they slowed down (really, they are being shot at and all they’d have to do is break a bit and they’d be fine, but nope). Thing is, none of these things are problems. And that’s half the brilliance. Captain America: The Winter Soldier was really stupid, but it didn’t seem to be. (It was also a good film.) Everything moved so quickly and plausible-sounding explanations were tossed around so that while watching, it seems to make sense. F&F doesn’t do that. It goes to the other extreme. It revels in its stupidity. There is zero pretext. Why are there girls in bikinis? Because girls in bikinis are nice to look at. Why are there helicopters and drones in downtown L.A.? Because that’s cool. Why…  Yeah, let’s forget about “why.” No reason to specify the question because the explanation is always “because it looks good/cool.” The rest of the brilliance is with the characters. They are so childishly simple, but perfectly defined—and there are a lot of characters. And they talk a lot about family. A lot. So I knew exactly who everyone was—completely—and what they meant to everyone else. I stepped into F&F 5 barely remembering the characters (and most were new anyway) and I knew them all within a few minutes. Color coding helps: White guy, serious Black guy, funny Black guy, Latina, Asian guy, Jewish girl, ambiguous-race guy, Black-Samoan guy. I can’t even be annoyed at how they manipulated that as it scores so well on representation.

So each film is two hours of multi-ethnic characters wrapped tightly together as a family, doing absolutely impossible things and pointing to those things and yelling “see how cool that impossible thing was.” And apparently, that makes for a great distraction. I don’t think I’ll see the 8th in a theater—theaters are lonely now. But I’ll look for it on home video. And maybe I’ll try the 4th.