It’s like a Bruce Springsteen song, if Bruce Springsteen was a Dungeons and Dragons-playing action movie
star portraying an illegal street racer in a glorified exploitation movie from 2001. There and then, The Fast
and the Furious had me by the fluffy dice.
This was especially impressive considering that at the time I couldn’t even drive (I still can’t, some might
say). Yet here I was hooked on a film about ridiculous people driving ridiculous cars at ridiculous speeds.
And giving ridiculous speeches.
There’s a case that Fast and Furious is the greatest cinematic franchise of the 21st century. Here is an
ongoing petrolhead epic brimming with thrills, spills and smoke-belching set-pieces. And now it is set to
once again confirm its supremacy at the box office, with spin-off Hobbs & Shaw heading for a $200m
(£164m) opening weekend. Years from now, a generation of moviegoers will look back and wonder why we
weren’t more appreciative of it while it was around.
Dwayne Johnson as Hobbs and Jason Statham
as Shaw (Universal Pictures)The Fast and the Furious drives rings around the Marvel films (too quippy). And it kicks dust in the face of
the DC extended universe (too dark, not enough speeches about living a quarter mile at a time). It zipped
off the grid 18 years ago like a nitro-fuelled bat from hell and has been accelerating ever since.
Fast & Furious: Hobbs & Shaw, which you should rush out to see immediately, continues this tradition. The
film is, technically speaking, a spin-off rather than a sequel proper. But, also technically speaking, this in no
way matters. What’s important is that, in pitting Dwayne Johnson’s Agent Luke Hobbs and Jason Statham’s
renegade secret service man Deckard Shaw against a computer enhanced super-villain played by Idris Elba,
F&F once again delivers. We get brake-squealing action punctuated with zinging one-liners and
knockabout humour. It’s the best 135 minutes of the summer.
If you’re not a true believer you’re probably a little bit iffy about F&F and its nine instalments to date.
That’s the other thing that sets its apart from other big-screen properties. Either you’re all in or you just
don’t get it. This is a $2bn cult franchise.
The more absurd the movies, the greater the enthusiasm among audiences. Meanwhile, an Avengers-worthy
crew of side-kicks and B-listers was assembled around the main players
The beginner’s guide to The Fast and the Furious is that it chronicles the ever more ludicrous adventures of
a group of international car thieves. The series started as a relatively straightforward and borderline gritty