A Rapid Week of Rage: Fast & Furious

To celebrate the release of Furious 7 this Easter Sunday, each night, I’ll watch one Fast & Furious movie and report on my findings. Join me as I follow our valiant illegal drag-racers as they tokyo drift across the various speed bumps and barricades life throws at them. Today, we cover Fast & Furious, the fourth in the series and the return of the first film’s principal cast. (It also has a title that is identical to the first film, save for a few missing articles.) As the poster tagline said, “New model. Original parts.”

What happens:

Fast & Furious begins with Dominic Toretto‘s (Vin Diesel’s) newly assembled team doing what they do best: hijacking trucks in the Dominican Republic. Toretto’s new crew is considerably more culturally diverse than his gang in The Fast and the Furious. Gone are Vince and Leon, replaced with the Latin-American duo of Tego (Tego Calderon) and Don Omar (as himself), as well as a mystery woman named Cara (Mirtha Michelle) and, from Tokyo Drift, Han (Sung Kang)! Han’s appearance behind the wheels places the fourth movie before the third, chronologically. A multi-tanker oil truck is driving along a treacherous stretch of rocky mountain pass when Toretto’s team, driving two to a vehicle, rolls up on it. Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) kisses Dominic and leaps from the car onto the trailer. She makes her way to the hitch and sprays it with some sort of liquid nitrogen. Meanwhile, Han makes a rapid 180 with his truck and reverses into the trailer, while his partner, Cara, runs to the truck flatbed and hitches the tanker to Han’s truck. Letty then smashes the now-frozen hitch with a hammer and Han drives away with a tanker full of petroleum. Pretty slick heist.

Tego and Don Omar move in to do the same with the truck’s second tanker when the trucker gets wise. He smashes into Dominic’s car – sending Letty scrambling and her hammer onto the road – and begins firing a pistol at them. At this point, Tego and Don Omar’s truck is already linked to the trailer, so Dominic orders Letty to spray the hitch. “I lost the hammer!” she yells. But Dominic Toretto doesn’t need a hammer. After Letty sprays the hitch, he smashes into it with his car, releasing the tanker car. By this point, the trucker realizes he’s driving too fast and the truck is on a collision course with a tight curve. He jumps from the vehicle. Letty must then leap onto Toretto’s hood while he outruns the driverless truck. The truck, running into the turn, crashes, and Dominic and Letty have to perfectly time a rapid escape: at the last second, they speed under the flaming tanker bouncing down the hill.

Any heist you can walk away from is a successful heist, so the team celebrates at a beach party. Dominic divvies up the money from the job, but Han is in no mood to celebrate. Looking pensive (and snacking, obviously), he warns Dominic that the authorities know too much about them, and he worries they’ll be caught soon. He can’t work on another job with Dom, and intimates he might drift over (my words) to Tokyo. Dominic then approaches his steady lady, Letty, reclining like mermaid on the beach. Dominic knows the authorities are after him (or he just learned from Han they are), and doesn’t want Letty to get caught with him. Letty thinks this is ridiculous (after all, she’s a pretty bad-ass truck hijacker, too), and tells him not to worry. They start making out on the beach, but that night, in a classic Spider-Man/James Bond/every tortured male hero move, he walks out on Letty, leaving her asleep in bed beside her cut of the heist.

Then we jump to the City of Angels, where Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker, no longer dressed like a skater, but in a suit) is in a foot chase with some perp through the crowded streets. At some point, the chasee knocks down a random security guard, takes his gun, and begins to fire into a crowd. O’Conner pursues the crook into a building and corners him on the roof. The perp, however, is waiting for him, gun trained on the rooftop doorway. But he doesn’t expect Brian O’Conner to jump through a nearby window, knocking both of them off the roof and two storeys down onto a car roof below. Holding a gun to the perp’s face, he shouts, “Give me a name!” That name: David Park.

Brian O’Conner is now working for the FBI. He shows up for a meeting and his superior, Penning, chides him for his little stunt downtown, but O’Conner notes his actions got results. Another agent, Stasiak (Shea Whigham), is unimpressed, given how many David Parks there must be in Los Angeles, a city with a large Korean-American population. The FBI is attempting to crack down on drug cartel leader Arturo Braga. The cartel is recruiting street racers (aren’t they always), and David Park is their connection. In a line of exposition that demonstrates the brilliant simplicity of Fast & Furious, O’Conner notes, “We find Park, we find the bad guys.”

Dominic Toretto, meanwhile, has been laying low in Mexico. But he receives a phone call from his sister, Mia (Jordana Brewster) that Letty has been murdered! O’Conner and the FBI, also looking for Toretto, keep watch over Letty’s funeral (historically, the funeral attended by the sweetest rides), hoping he’ll make an appearance. However, Toretto stays out of their line of sight and mourns from a distant hilltop. He later returns to his house, the old Toretto homestead, to see his sister. During a tearful reunion, Mia warns Dominic their house is probably under surveillance. She also shows him his old Dad-haunted muscle car, which Mia says Letty had been fixing up. “It’s like she knew you were coming back,” Mia says. Dom asks to see the crash site.

Dominic walks through the skid marks on a lonely stretch of highway, recreating the scene in his mind as if he were, like, Will Graham in Hannibal or Willem Dafoe in Boondock Saints. From some powder burns, Dom is able to determine (a) Letty was shot after the crash, and (b) the other car involved used nitro methyl, and only one mechanic in Los Angeles sells it. Brian, meanwhile, sits alone in his car, reading through the various records of the dozens of David Parks in Los Angeles that his partner Trinh (Liza Lapria, one of my favourite character actresses of all time) assembled, and eating a burrito of sadness. While that’s happening, his fellow FBI agent, the dickish Stasiak, brings in Mia to interrogate her about whether her brother is back in town.

While Dominic menaces the nitro-meth-selling mechanic, Brian reconnects with his old flame, Mia. Brian takes Mia out of the FBI office almost as soon as Stasiak brings her in. Across town, Dom is holding an engine block over the weasel mechanic’s head with one arm (Vin Diesel is a monster!), threatening to let go unless he tells him who he did the nitro meth upgrade for. The answer: he modified a green Torino for David Park. (But, as we learned earlier, there are a lot of David Parks in Los Angeles. It couldn’t be the same guy, could it?) Over lunch, Mia and Brian don’t exactly rekindle their old-time magic. Brian warns her to stay away from Dom, and Mia lashes out at him, wondering if that’s all he has to say after so many years and after lying to her about being a cop. She asks him why he let Dom go all those years ago, and he can’t answer. Mia storms out and Brian, I guess, finishes another meal in utter despair.

Thanks to Trinh pulling the vehicle registration of some of the most likely David Parks, Brian figures out which David Park is his suspect by seeing which one has the most awesome car. However, as he arrives at Park’s apartment, Dominic Toretto has Mr. Park dangling out his window by his leg. Dom wants to know who owns the green Torino, and Park starts blubbering about some mysterious race. Brian comes up behind this tableau and draws his gun, telling his old frenemy Dom to put Park down. He tells him that Park is just a means for the FBI to get to Braga. So now, Dominic has another name. He drops Park and Brian runs to his rescue. While he’s pulling Park in through the window, Dominic escapes.

O’Conner returns to the FBI where he’s immediately confronted by Stasiak, enraged he let Mia go. O’Conner, showing some of that furiousness of the movie’s title, smashes Stasiak’s annoying face into a wall and Penning has to break it up. After a stern warning, Penning informs Brian, Stasiak, and Trinh of the good news: Campos (John Ortiz), Braga’s second-in-command, is holding a race in Koreatown to find a new driver. Braga has already selected three drivers, but he needs a fourth. David Park, cooperating with the FBI, can get O’Conner into that race. Brian picks a car from the FBI’s impound lot and promptly begins modifying it. As an additional modification, he also has to include an FBI tracking device. Dominic Toretto is also hard at work modifying his own car. He’s planning to race for that driver spot in Braga’s operation, as it will bring him one step closer to Letty’s killer in the green Torino.

Both O’Conner and Toretto arrive for the race (awkward), and they’re promptly greeted by one of Braga’s new drivers, a mouthy guy who looks like David Spade in a cowboy outfit. Campos, driving golf balls into a netting over the parking lot, tells the assembled drivers the rules of the race and what they’ll be doing for him. His assistant, Gisele (Gal Gadot) contributes additional background. When Dominic asks what they’ll be driving, Campos says they don’t need to know. Dom shoots back with some car wisdom: “You said you wanted real drivers. A real driver knows exactly what’s in his car.” One of the other drivers, an anxious guy who speaks in Chris-Tucker-like tones, asks who’s closing the streets off. Campos’s answer: no one. They’re street racing on the busy Los Angeles streets tonight! They get the directions on dashboard GPS and race off, at many times driving headlong into oncoming traffic. Brian, you’ll be happy to know, is still rocking the black Chucks as he jams the pedal to the metal. Two of the other drivers quickly get into horrible accidents. Brian, meanwhile, gets knocked way off-course and must drive through a fence and down a hill to get back onto the highway. The nervous guy from earlier tries to ram Dom’s muscle car, but Dom brakes hard and sends the other driver rolling over the edge of an overpass. Then it’s just Brian and Dom.

Brian starts gaining on Dom in the straightaway, but Dom bumps him at the last minute, causing Brian’s car to spin out. Dom has won the driver spot in Braga’s organization, totally ruining Brian’s undercover operation. He jumps out the car, outraged that Dom bumped him. “I didn’t realize there were any rules,” Dom growls. Interestingly, though, Dominic does not reveal that Brian is an FBI agent to Campos, nor does Brian tell Campos that Dominic is joining their organization just to get revenge. (Bro code and all, I guess.) However, Brian has a Plan B. The FBI break into the home of the David Spade guy – busy engaging in some foot fetish play with some young ladies – and plant crystal meth in his house. The charges won’t stick, Brian explains to a fellow agent, but Braga will need a new driver. And who else would he choose but the race’s runner-up?

Brian and Dominic arrive at Braga’s club to meet with Campos, who begins to realize the two drivers must know each other. “He used to date my sister,” Dominic explains. “You’re a lucky man,” Campos says to Brian. “You’re still alive.” Then Dominic flashes that big charming smile we all love. Campos leaves them to enjoy the club, and our two heroes start snooping. Brian follows Campos and spies on a secret back-room meeting between him and (probably) Braga. Dom, meanwhile, finds the garage and a green Torino inside. There, he again encounters Gisele, who says that the car belongs to Fenix. (Not the city of Phoenix.) Gisele starts flirting with Dom pretty fierce, and asks him what kind of woman he goes for. Dominic then delivers a monologue about his perfect woman, straight out of some sort of hybrid of Top Gear and The Bachelor: “20% angel, 80% devil.” When Gisele remarks that this woman doesn’t sound anything like her, Dom confesses, “It ain’t.” (Awww, he’s still in love with Letty!)

Brian O’Conner returns to the FBI with some glasses that may have Braga’s fingerprints. While Trinh starts running the prints against international databases, Brian gets his first work call from Braga. He races over to the meeting point, a secluded garage, but it quickly becomes clear that Braga’s goons are scanning all the drivers’ cars for tracking devices. O’Conner desperately (but, like, causally) rips out the FBI scanner from his gearshift and dumps it into a can of NOS in the cup holder. Or maybe it’s NOS-flavoured soda? (It was unclear.) Disaster temporarily averted, all the drivers and their cars are loaded into a truck and driven to parts unknown. When they’re dumped out of the trucks, they find themselves in Mexico. Gisele, who ferried them here, tells them to drive and connect with Fenix (a.k.a. Letty’s killer), who will provide the drug haul and lead them through a blind spot along the American border. “Vaya con dios,” she tells Dominic, maintaining the spiritual Point Break connection.

The drivers race through the desert, meet up with Fenix, who drives them through a secret tunnel through the mountains. This tunnel conceals them from the border patrol, but it’s a dangerous old mining tunnel, full of dead ends and rickety supports. (Think of the mine in The Temple of Doom.) When the drivers emerge from the harrowing tunnel race, Dominic exits the car and taunts Fenix (who has a hammer and sickle neck tattoo) by saying “only pussies use nitro meth.” Obviously, Fenix gets all up in his face about this. But little does he know that Dom rigged the nitrous in his car to ignite. The car explodes, chaos erupts, and Dom starts beating on Fenix while Brian grabs a machine gun and starts firing. Brian grabs a truck and Dominic, leaving Fenix alive, joins him in his escape.

Brian checks in with his friends at the FBI, who are none too pleased with him. Traffic cameras picked up photos of him and Toretto together. They want Brian to scrap the Braga operation and bring in Toretto instead. Brian sees this as a much greater opportunity to nail Braga and refuses. Dom, who was hit by something (he’s bleeding) finds the approximately $6 million of drugs in the back of the truck. They have to hide it, so they stash the truck where the FBI and cartel is least likely to look for it: the FBI impound lot. They then go to Dominic’s Los Angeles safe house (near some oil derricks) and Brian calls Mia. Mia arrives and patches up her brother’s wound. Then they all say grace and have a mostly pleasant dinner. But after, as Brian and Mia chat about men and their codes (not, like, cheat codes), Dom finds Letty’s cell phone and calls the last incoming number. Brian’s phone starts ringing and Dominic immediately loses his cool. He tosses Brian through some shelving units and starts pounding him, despite Mia’s protests. “You were running Letty?!” he shouts. Brian explains that Letty was working for the FBI for him. Letty was trying to clear Dom’s name. Dominic retreats in shame. A perfectly good evening is ruined.

The FBI wants O’Conner to bring in the drug shipment he found in the truck, but Brian realizes they can use this to get Braga. (This old story again.) He’s confident he can get Braga to agree to an in-person trade. Dominic, in his sweet white sweater, calls Gisele and sets up the trade. While they wait in a parking garage for Braga and his thugs to arrive, Brian tells Dominic how the FBI is going to clear his record once the operation is done. Dom smiles and turns to him, “You still put out milk and cookies for Santa Claus?” (I love how cynical these movies are about law enforcement! Also, I love seeing Vin Diesel smile.) Campos, Gisele, and Fenix show up and deliver Braga, an older Mexican gentleman in a suit carrying a duffel bag full of money. While this trade-off is happening, Trinh (back at the FBI office) has had a breakthrough with the fingerprints on the glass. She’s being sent a photo of Braga from Interpol (or somewhere). Stasiak, like Markham before him in 2 Fast 2 Furious, gets anxious about the trade and tells the SWAT team to move in too early. And just before they strike, Brian, Dom, and Trinh back at the office realize something crucial: the old man isn’t Braga; Campos is Braga!

A firefight erupts and Fenix and Campos/Braga hop into a car. They just about nearly run over Gisele, but Dom dives to push her out the car’s path. Braga escapes and O’Conner is taken off the case, due to the massive screw-up (that was largely Stasiak’s fault). Which is just as well, as Braga is reportedly back in Mexico, outside the FBI’s jurisdiction. Dom stands before Letty’s grave like he’s in a Seal music video and makes some hard decisions. (We also learn that Letty’s full name is Leticia Ortiz.) He heads back to his garage and does some man stuff with Brian. Dominic is going into Mexico to find Braga and Brian wants to join him. Just then, Mia returns from grocery shopping. Brian follows her in, she starts crying, and they promptly knock boots on the kitchen counter. (Sometimes words are unnecessary.) All while Dominic tinkers with an engine outside.

Outside the Mexican border, Brian and Dominic (now fondling Letty’s massive crucifix) wait for Gisele to arrive. Since Dom saved her life, she returns the favour by telling her how to find Braga in Mexico. Then it’s a kiss on the cheek, another “vaya con dios,” and our heroes head into enemy territory. Braga and his goons, meanwhile, arrive at a Spanish mission and pay off the padre so they can use it as their sanctuary. (Both the state and the church are overtly crooked in the world of Fast & Furious!) Yet within minutes, Brian and Dominic have entered the church with guns trained on Braga. Braga, with misguided faith in people’s respect for the Catholic church, insists he can’t be arrested here, but Brian has other thoughts.

With Braga in their custody, Brian and Dominc, much like so many Taco Bell customers before them, run for the border. Braga’s men find he’s been taken, and the race is on to stop our heroes before they reach the U. S. of A. Braga starts off taunting his driver, Brian, but becomes a whole less lot cocky once his own men start firing upon the car. The whole situation becomes very Mad Max, with cars racing and bumping into one another across a desert landscape. Brian, remembering where the secret cross-border tunnel was earlier, smashes through the false mountain entrance, pursued by a very angry Fenix. As they emerge on the American side, Fenix rams Brian’s car, causing them to roll. The devoted goon pulls his boss Braga from the wreck, and a wheezing Brian drags himself from the other car door. Fenix is just about to shoot Brian dead when Dominic emerges from the tunnel in his black muscle car of doom. Brian holds Fenix’s ankle so he can’t escape, and Dom rams his car straight into Fenix’s chest, killing him.

Sirens blare in the distance, and Dominic decides he’s not running anymore. He’s going to face the consequences of a lifetime of to-the-extreme actions. Weeks or months later, we see Toretto in his orange prison jumpsuit, being arraigned in court. Despite Brian’s testimony about how Dominic was invaluable to the arrest of a drug cartel boss, the judge, like Shania Twain, is not impressed much. He sentences Toretto to twenty-five years to life, without parole. Mia and Brian are anguished. In the final sequence, Dominic boards a prison bus. As it speeds down the freeway, it’s pursued by three black, super-charged vehicles driven by Brian, Mia, and the duo of Tego and Don Omar. Looks like we’ve got a mobile prison break on our hands!

Takeaway points:

• Fast & Furious continues this series’ complete lack of trust in the law. You can’t trust the police or any branch of the government in this series. Instead, individual men’s codes supersede all government laws. This particular film also demonstrates that the church can also not be trusted. Basically: Man’s Law < God’s Law < Dominic Toretto’s Law.
• If I’ve learned one thing from the Fast & Furious movies, it’s that criminal organizations are constantly in need of good street racers. If you want to get into a cartel or the mafia or the yakuza, they’re always hiring drivers.
• Invariably in every Fast & Furious movie, our heroes end up in the club at some point, but never once do our heroes dance. Which seems a shame. However, you can always count on there to be at least two women kissing at the club.
• The death of Letty in Fast & Furious is tragic, and all the more disheartening because it happens off-screen. This leaves both Dominic and the audience unable to truly mourn, and certainly unable to move on (as we see in the scene where he politely declines Gisele’s advances). The film also suffers without Letty, because Michelle Rodriguez is undeniably an electric on-screen presence. Her murder also reduces our number of compelling heroines. Mia is reduced to a cry factory for most of the action, so it’s good to see her behind the wheel at the finale. At least Gisele steps up with the potential to become a recurring character.
• The other night, I remarked to a friend how strangely novel it was to see an action movie set in L.A. that features so many Latino or Mexican-American cast members, as well as so much spoken Spanish. So many other contemporary movies set in Los Angeles act as if the city was a white enclave where the Mexican-American population simply doesn’t exist.
• The hip-hop/musical artists who double as actors in this Fast & Furious movie are Don Omar and Tego Calderon, who appear to be playing themselves. But their roles are tiny. There’s so much Pitbull on the soundtrack, you’d think they could have thrown him a bone and given him a role, too.

How fast?: It’s pretty fast! Even in the treacherous, hard-turn tunnels between Mexico and the U.S., our heroes rarely let the meters fall below 100 mph. Still, I’ve seen faster in some of the other movies.

How furious? The fourth movie may be the most furious one yet! The increased fury is largely due to (a) the return of Vin Diesel as Dominic Toretto, and (b) the death of Letty, Dominic Toretto’s partner. Letty’s death means Dom is quick to drop perps from buildings, throw his buds through metal shelving units, and even ram his car into people. Even the usually serene Brian O’Conner is smashing his co-workers’ faces into walls. The fury is contagious!

Favourite car stunt: Is it wrong to think they frontloaded this movie with all the best car action? The multi-tanker oil truck heist is fantastic. I can’t resist a hairpin 180, nor can I resist Michelle Rodriguez leaping onto the roof of a moving vehicle.

Most magical soundtrack cue: Soulja Boy’s “Crank That” is on the Fast & Furious soundtrack, so it’s automatic winner. Plus, its a remix by Blink-182 and former Aquabat, Travis Barker, so … that happened.

Unexpected cameo: If you thought you recognized that perp that Brian O’Conner knocks off a rooftop, that’s because he’s played by Cesar Garcia, who you might know as No-Doze, Tuco’s really unfortunate right-hand man in Breaking Bad.

Bechdel Test Moment: I honestly cannot remember two women speaking to one another in this movie. Mia recalls speaking to Letty while Dom was M.I.A, but that happens off-screen, and they probably talk about Dom, so it wouldn’t count. One can assume Mia also spoke to some female mourners at Letty’s funeral, possibly about grief.

Line of dialogue that makes it clear we’re talking both about a car and the driver’s sexual organ(s): “I’m a boy who appreciates a good body, regardless of the make.” – Dominic (to Gisele)

Best fashion moment: For much of the film, Dominic is dressed in khaki pants and a bright white ribbed sweater, like he’s a member of soulDecision. I should also draw attention to Mia’s almost universally hideous wardrobe. In nearly every scene, she’s clothed in a sun dress with a cardigan pulled over top, I imagine to signify her girl-next-door-ishness. But it reads more like her car-obsessed older brother chose her outfit.

Next up: Fast Five (2011).