Furious 7 Started 2 Annoying Fast & Furious Trends

Furious 7 is the highest-grossing Fast and Furious film of all time, but it also started two annoying trends that have been following the saga ever since. Released in 2015 following the tragic passing of Paul Walker, Furious 7 was a bittersweet turning point in the franchise as it had to bid farewell to Brian. Costing twice as Fast Five and significantly more than Fast & Furious 6, Furious 7 expanded the scale of the saga even further – but it did so by using two narrative tricks that did not fit very well into the saga.
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The fact that Fast & Furious 6 made $788.7 million at the box office on a $160 million budget meant that Furious 7 could go even bigger than the previous two films in terms of cast, locations, and action sequences. Furious 7 once again took the crew overseas to perform a mission in which only the Fast and Furious family could succeed, all while having to run from Deckard Shaw – the man who had seemly killed Han and that wanted to fulfill his revenge against Toretto’s crew for what they had done to his brother Owen Shaw.

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With such a convoluted premise and a large cast of established Fast and Furious actors combined with new additions like Jason Statham and Djimon Hounsou, Furious 7 had to find a way to make that global adventure work within the world of Dom Toretto and his family. Furious 7 found two solutions to that problem. One was to have Kurt Russell’s Mr. Nobody serving as an all-powerful government agent who had the power and the clearances to recruit Dom Toretto’s crew and send them anywhere on the planet. The other solution was to give Furious 7 a MacGuffin, the incredibly powerful tracking device God’s Eye. While both Russell’s Mr. Nobody and the God’s Eye made it easier for Furious 7 to explain why the retired Dominic Toretto and his team would lead an international mission, both of those storytelling tricks were wrongfully carried onto The Fate of the Furious and F9. The “Mr. Nobody recruits the crew” routine and the hacking MacGuffin made the last two Fast and Furious films feel far more predictable and therefore less exciting.

The Last Three Fast & Furious Films Have Told The Same Story

Given how both The Fate of the Furious and F9 used Furious 7’s Mr. Nobody and hacking MacGuffin similarly to the 2015 film, the last three Fast and Furious movies have told pretty much the same story. The premise is simple – an international criminal goes after a hacking device, followed by Mr. Nobody pointing Dom Toretto and his crew to where they need to go. That same description can be applied to Furious 7, The Fate of the Furious, and F9, which proves how similar and less inspired the Fast and Furious movies have become. That problem became even worse going from The Fate of the Furious to F9, as Charlie Theron’s Cipher returned in the latter with the same plans and motivations she had in the former. Mr. Nobody may have had little screen time in F9, but the concept of the Fast and Furious main characters being worldwide secret agents remained.

For a saga that always tries to outdo itself going from one film to the next, Fast and Furious has become way too predictable. The Mr. Nobody gimmick and the hacking MacGuffin worked in Furious 7, but those should have not become the norm for Fast and Furious. With Fast X having the highest budget for a Fast and Furious film, it remains to be seen if the film will also follow that recent formula or if it will try something new.

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