The Fast and the Furious 2001 (only)

[BTTFSpencer]

I've been thinking about this film recently, for some reason it has been popping up and I've been listening to it repeatedly at work because I like engine sound effects and strange music. It doesn't really strike a chord a whole lot but it has an abundance of nostalgia for me as a little kid wanting toys of those cars... and getting them.

It's a bit like Point Break, not quite similar enough to be called a rip-off. There are quite a few coincidences though. Now, I know you guys aren't snobs because look... you're building Iron Man suits and Ant Man costumes. A lot of you even dig the recent Star Wars movies.

Throw what you think onto the pile. I'm not interested in rotten tomatos scores.

Here's what I'll throw. It's simple, easy to follow, has a somewhat cool (albeit guilty pleasure) soundtrack, the score gives it a personality and character. The cars are outlandish and I enjoy that. I love the sound effects and the mood of LA shown. Some of the stunts are insane. I like the character played by Ted Levine, although it isn't fleshed out. I like all of the characters with the exception of some bad acting by the dude playing Harry and maybe Michelle Rodriguez, it's a cringefest at times.

It's a simplistic movie... but dammit, sometimes those are the best ones. I don't like to sit down and watch Shawshank. I'm just a 25 year old dude, not a cinefile and by the looks of some of the stuff posted around, I doubt neither are many of you.

 

[batguy]

I read a reviewer calling F&F#1 "a great 'bad' movie." That pretty much nails it. It's modern drive-in-theater B-movie trash, but it came out better than it should have.

The cast helped. At the time there was a feeling that some of those actors belonged in better movies. Particularly Diesel. Notice he didn't come back to F&F again after #1 until the franchise started growing in budget/quality in the Justin Lin era.

They also nailed a subculture that had been blooming for a while by then. The import tuner car thing. A lot of that stuff didn't age as well as the actors did. (Car guys were already smirking at some of that stuff at the time it came out.) After the first F&F movie the producers figured out that it was better to embrace all different areas of the automotive hobbies. Imports, muscle cars, exotics, etc. But the raw immature energy of the import scene was really conveyed in the first movie and the series never felt that grounded in reality again.

The later movies have turned into very high-grade blockbuster stuff but they lost a lot of the flavor of the original. The newer ones aren't totally generic spy-thriller stuff, but they have moved a long way in that direction from where they started. If you'd told me in 2001 that 15 years later we would be watching sequels of this with Vin Diesel's crew being chased across a frozen lake by a Russian Navy sub shooting torpedoes at them . . . WTF?

There are some replicas of the F&F cars out there.
If you count the cars that aren't direct specific replicas, but are clearly influenced by the prop cars . . . it's a lot more. Hundreds.

 

[JoMamma_Smurf]

The original F&F changed the entire car scene in America. It's impact on car culture cannot be denied. It is one of those movies that holds a special place in my heart and always will. I was 20 when it came out and in a round about way it is one of the main reasons I learned how to work on cars. It was the Point Break of the 2000's. None of it's sequels can really capture the charm of the original. They have become heist movies mixed with Bourne action and I don't even see them in the theaters anymore. If they re-released TF&F in theaters I would absolutely LOVE to catch it again on the big screen.

 

[CB2001]

Honestly, I like the first film. To me, everything went off the rails when they decided to continue into the repetitiveness of awesome stunt sequences, and constant heist missions that are supposed to be "the last one", and the constant reiterating of "family matters" when everyone and their mother got it in the first film without anyone actually having to say it. The first film is the only one I own, and the only one I ever acknowledge as existing.

 

[dbuck]

I made a fair bit of money back in the day selling intakes and coffee can exhausts. I figure I added on five horsepower per car at best, but it made the kids happy. Sold stickers like crazy, fake carbon fiber shift knobs, all that garbage.

 

[JediG60racer]

Been heavily entrenched in the SoCal street racing scene since the early 90s. We universally adore these movies, as cheesy as they are.