Nope, There’s Nothing Fast & Furious Can’t Do Now (Which Is Great)

The Fast & Furious series keeps getting more ridiculous, and there is truly no ceiling on how unmoored from reality it can get. Once upon a time, the extended tale of The Fast Saga was a grounded in relative reality with a focus on street racing. While 2001’s The Fast & the Furious did not even try to mask its transparent Point Break-influences, the film’s success began the unlikely tale of Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and his family to wilder adventures.
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In the two decades since then, those adventures have progressively shown Dom and his cohorts in outlandish situations where any regard for reality is out the window. Over the course of the Fast & Furious movies, Dom and co. have graduated from street racing to bank heists to outrunning submarines and even heading into space. With how merrily preposterous The Fast Saga has become, the question of how far the series can continue pushing itself to such extremes has become one of its most discussed topics.

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The truth of the matter is that, in abandoning realism and practically becoming a superhero franchise, the Fast & Furious movies can get away with virtually anything. The main reason is that, unlike other action movie franchises, The Fast Saga lacks any concern at all with passing itself off as realistic. Indeed, for the Fast & Furious movies, doing the exact opposite is the entire point of the series.

Fast & Furious’ Absurdity Makes The Movies Special

The Fast Saga is the rare tent pole franchise that is arguably incomparable to any other franchise. The movies’ self-aware brand of silliness incrementally increased from The Fast and the Furious to F9, becoming more visible than ever with the release of the latter. However, by the time of Fast & Furious 6’s completely ridiculous Dom rescue, it had already become clear that when it comes to realism, the series is at best indifferent. Whether that adds or subtracts to the artistic worth of the latter-day Fast & Furious movies is really beside the point. The far more important argument is whether or not The Fast Saga succeeds at its absurdly over-the-top premises.

Only in The Fast Saga can one see a chase in an airport that seemingly runs for miles in Fast & Furious 6 or Dom leaping a car across skyscrapers in Furious 7. Nowhere but in The Fast Saga can a man exhibit the kind of strength Hobbs does to hold a helicopter in place by a chain, as he does in Hobbs & Shaw. The general physical zaniness of F9 and its introduction of space travel is also as one-of-a-kind as the series as a whole. For The Fast Saga, ridiculousness is a feature rather than a bug. No doubt, it’s central to the very identity of the franchise at this point.

Why Fast & Furious Movies Can Go Even Bigger Than Space

F9’s aforementioned space travel component seemed to push the Fast & Furious series to its most absurd frontier. However, the entire idea behind that lies in doing something in The Fast Saga that was its most outrageous feat of outright ignoring reality in favor of entertainment value. That is not a mindset that the Fast & Furious movies have shown even the slightest indication of abandoning, and there is every reason to expect Fast X and Fast 11 to push things even further.

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Numerous elements of Hobbs & Shaw and F9 also present a strong case that aliens will be in Fast X, and that too is another franchise addition that has no road block in The Fast Saga. Though the suggested crossover with the Jurassic World franchise is unlikely, the fact that one has even been proposed shows how not out of place dinosaurs would be in Fast X, while time-travel has also been highly suspected in Fast X. With each new element of sci-fi or fantastical territory that is proposed for The Fast Saga’s two-part finale, the one constant is that absolutely nothing has been suggested that would be a bridge too far for it. The Fast Saga’s indelible loophole is the simple fact that it cannot violate its own internal logic when it clearly does not care about maintaining any.

As The Fast Saga prepares its ending, the series may have come to lack so much as a tangential connection to reality, but that’s been central to the franchise’s success by giving it an identity not only unique to itself, but one that also cannot be replicated. Ultimately, The Fast Saga is fueled by the power of family over logic. As long as that is the case, there is no restriction to how laughably impossible any Fast & Furious movie can rise to.

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