Fast and Furious

Frenemies Luke Hobbs and Deckard Shaw are getting their ‘Fast and Furious’ spinoff sooner than we’d thought.

Tyrese Gibson has taken to posting (and the deleting) pleas on social media for Dwayne Johnson not to leave the Fast and Furious franchise like a lovestruck ex. At least, that’s what everyone figures is going on, because there is clearly something going on between the two. Tyrese Gibson has been commenting and the deleting messages to The Rock on his Instagram posts, and today posted an Instagram himself, along with a plea for Johnson to call him back.

Michelle Rodriguez, who has starred in five ‘Fast & Furious’ entries and is also a woman, isn't going to leave this alone: The franchise needs to do better by its women.

Here’s a question for you: is it time to add Vin Diesel to the list of actors whose career is defined entirely by a single film franchise? Sure, Diesel has shown up in other successful movies throughout his careers — Saving Private Ryan, The Iron Giant, and Guardians of the Galaxy have all been critical and commercial successes, not to mention his more niche productions like Find Me Guilty and his Riddick movies — but none of this holds a candle to his work on the Fast and Furious franchise. He’s been producer, screenwriter, and star of those movies for over 16 years now… I mean, nobody goes up to William Shatner and praises him for his work in Judgment at Nuremberg, right?

Fast and Furious franchise star Michelle Rodriguez made waves this week with her comment that the film series needs to “give more love” to its female characters, driving her point home with the faint threat of exiting the franchise. And while her diplomatically-phrased initial statement was hardly furious, the response to it has arrived in a manner I can describe only as… fast.

The Fast and Furious franchise has earned some praise from socially-inclined critics for its utopian vision of a world where people of all races — white, black, Latino, Asian, Vin Diesel — can join hands and drive cars out of buildings in multicultural harmony. But these films have not done well by women to anything close to the same extent. In the recent Fate of the Furious, Dom’s baby mama gets murdered, hacker-babe Ramsey spends the run time getting eye-banged by Tyrese and Ludacris (neither of whom know her last name), and Cipher... well, Cipher was Cipher.

While fans have mostly been enthusiastic about the expanded role of Jason Statham in The Fate of the Furious, there is one thing that has stuck in their collective craw. While Statham’s character has the movie’s best moments, he never stops to address the elephant in the room: Shaw did kill Sung Kang’s Han, perhaps the most beloved character in the franchise and (we assumed) an unforgivable offense for a movie built on family. Will the filmmakers address this in a future installment of the Fast and the Furious films? Or, perhaps more intriguing, could Sung Kang find his way back into the franchise?

It may not have made a lick of sense within the emotional continuity of the series, but it’s hard to argue that the comedic highlight of The Fate of the Furious was Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham’s snappy banter. Johnson’s Hobbs winds up in jail right across the hall from his old arch-nemesis Deckard Shaw, played by Statham, and their chemistry is immediate and hilarious. Their playful back-and-forth throughout F8 kept things light and fun even as Dominic Toretto sold out his beloved family to work for Charlize Theron’s evil hacker Cipher.

You surely know that Paul Walker tragically passed away in 2013. But did you know that in order to finish Furious 7 while giving his character, Brian O’Conner, a fitting sendoff, the creators of Furious 7 had to use a combination of digital effects and body doubles, which included Walker’s brothers, Caleb and Cody? That’s just one of the fast facts featured in the latest episode of You Think You Know Movies!

In The Fate of the Furious, the eighth installment in the car-jacking, street racing franchise, Vin Diesel’s Dom Toretto does the worst thing a man of his values can do: He turns his back on family. That six letter, three syllable mantra is the sentimental thread that holds the Fast and Furious crew together, and what adds heart to an action series suffused with cars and criminals. One would assume there must be good reason to plot an entire film around something so antithetical to the spirit of the series. But that reveal winds up being the silliest and most left-field twist since the time the movies explained Letty’s (Michelle Rodriguez) return with amnesia.