"THE FOREVER PURGE" (2021)

"The Forever Purge"
Directed by Everardo Gout
Written by James DeMonaco
Starring Ana de la Reguera, Josh Lucas, Will Patton, Tenoch Huerta
Running time 1 hour, 43 minutes
MPAA rated R "for strong/bloody violence, and language throughout"

By Hunter Bush

Back in 2013 when the original Purge came out, I remember thinking that it looked fun and was a great, if laughably implausible scenario for a movie: Everyone in the country just doesn't really do crime until this one night of the year? Pull the other one, Blumhouse. Now though, the damn franchise is almost as prescient, as "ripped from the headlines" as the latest Law & Order episodes. It's astounding and a little frightening.

Filming for The Forever Purge began in November of 2019 and wrapped in February 2020 and even though these films are written to be topical, dealing with the societal issues of the time, there was no way series creator and writer James DeMonaco could have anticipated just how on-point he would be. The inciting incident in The Forever Purge is essentially the January 6th assault on the capitol, but on a national scale: well-armed lunatics, disillusioned with the direction the country is headed and thinking themselves somehow "more American" than the rest of the country attempt to change things by force.

The concept of who is - and what makes you - American is what The Forever Purge is concerned with. Remember, it had finished filming before the COVID-19 crisis reached its apex, before the assault on the capitol, back when the smart money would have been on immigration and border policies being the next big national concern and it's legitimately staggering how many dystopic moments our country has been through in just the last 18 months or so.

This concept of a Dystopian Turducken is present in The Forever Purge, but in a more believable, grounded, realistic-feeling way than *checks notes* real life. That's right, the franchise where all crime is legal for 12 hours once a year feels like it operates on better internal logic than the world we all wake up to each day.. As I mentioned above, after we've introduced our characters, and watched them all get through that year's Purge Night uneventfully, we see that there are some folks around who don't want to Purge to end, so they just keep Purging. Like Dory from Finding Nemo, if she were wearing a skull mask and brandishing a machete.

To be honest with you, I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. I was expecting there to be some puppet master manipulating events from behind the scenes; a face we could ascribe this evilness to. But there isn't one. To that end, late in the runtime our group of survivors encounter insurrectionists lead by a pair calling themselves Mother and Father because a movie will always feel more satisfying if you end it by killing the bad guy and it's pretty impossible to shoot the concept of Dangerous Social Unrest in the head and call it a day.

That's something which continually impresses me in the Purge series: their track record of making smart cinematic choices at the expense of franchise tendencies. The original trilogy - The Purge (2013), Anarchy (2014), and Election Year (2016) - kept expanding on the size and scope of the previous entry before juking back around with prequel The First Purge (2018). At some point, upping the scale becomes untenable and less engaging, unless you're The Fast & The Furious of course - the exception which proves the rule - so I was glad that while the story unfolding around our main characters was of a national scale, our gang wasn't going to "fix" it. They're all just concerned with their own survival and as a result, it's easy for us to be, too.

Since the Purge films don't follow the same group of characters through every installment, like the Fasts & Furiouses, we start The Forever Purge with a blank slate and have a limited time - under 2 hours (!) - to establish our characters. There's the ranch owning Tucker family consisting of a patriarch (Will Patton), his adult children (Josh Lucas and Leven Rambin) and daughter-in-law (Cassidy Freeman) as well as two of their employees Juan (Tenoch Huerta) and TT (Alejandro Edda) and Juan's wife Adela (Ana de la Reguera), all kicking around in the opening act of the film.

That's a lot of characters to introduce and on top of that there's also a bunch of thematic track to lay regarding what makes you an American and can you be "more American" than someone else? Are the Tucker family - life long Texans - more American than Juan and his wife who have been in the US for ten months? Previously to now, the Purge films have been more focused on class disparity than race as a theme, though since class and race are so inextricably linked in the country, race and racism have popped up a few times in the franchise. Still it's refreshing to see a shift in franchise focus that feels both timely and like a natural extension of what has come before. Sure, some of the more thematically-relevant moments are subtler than others, but it's still admirable to see filmmakers equally committed to both entertainment and enlightenment.

The Forever Purge is extremely well-balanced in that regard. For every time I felt like the film was pointedly commenting on something, there were twice as many moments where I was completely lost in the movie, enjoying myself. Watching characters plow through roadblocks in a huge truck? Awesome. Bad guys getting their heads pulverized by construction equipment? That's half of why I showed up!

Way back before production on The Forever Purge had begun, James DeMonaco had said that he thought of it as the last installment in the franchise, but seeing the note that it ends on (no spoilers here, don't worry) I don't know if I think that's still true. This feels like it could be the start of a new take on the universe, new goals, new opposition, new challenges. I'm ready for those movies; ready for whatever's next. I just hope it stays more firmly in the realm of fiction.

The Forever Purge is now in theaters and might be on demand

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This piece was written for MovieJawn, a fabulous site where you can find tons of other excellent movie-centric writings, a shop where you can subscribe to the quarterly physical zine, or listen to me on the  Hate Watch / Great Watch  podcast! Support the MovieJawn Patreon here!
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EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN - Vol. 29

EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN
Vol. 29 - July 2021

By: Hunter Bush

Howdy! Howdy, one and all. Welcome to another installment of Everything Old is New Again, the column where I assess some of the upcoming film & television projects with an eye on the ones that are based on some previously existing intellectual property. More importantly, welcome back to some sense of cautious normalcy.

That's right! You can, if you so desire, return to theaters in most places. I was just in a theater for the first time since March 10th, 2020 (that time was to see The Hunt, this time to see the latest Fast & Furious) and while it obviously wasn't a completely normal experience, it still felt a little like coming home. I love movie theaters. That feeling when the lights go down is unlike almost anything else for me - the closest comparison is cresting the first hill of a roller coaster. But it won't feel "normal" until I can feel comfortable in a crowded theater again, which for me will be a while.

That said, *you* might be rip roarin' and ready to go, in which case you're in luck: There are a LOT of in-theater options for your viewing pleasure in July! As always, EOINA only deals with Remakes, Adaptations and Legacy Sequel projects. Even so, you won't be hurting for choices. Let's take a look!

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PREMIERS

All the brand new flicks worth talking about!

2nd

The Forever Purge (dir. Everardo Gout)
Where: Theaters

"Art imitates life". By now, things being the way they have, you've probably become familiar with this saying. Maybe you yourself have pondered, as I have, the prevalence of post-apocalyptic/dystopian stories being told now, the way the concerns of the 1980s lent themselves to viral outbreak narratives. Well The Purge series which began in 2013 has certainly had moments that feel not only reflective of the times, but occasionally horrifyingly prescient. And if that weren't enough, they're throwing down the gauntlet with their latest installment The Forever Purge which seems to be tied to another axiom: "No matter how bad things are, they can always get worse." In the world of The Purge, for those not familiar, there is one night a year in which all crime is legal. A sort of societal pressure valve that serves as the bread and circuses for the citizens of this particular near-future semi-dystopian American. But a really messed up and dark system is still a system and there will always be folks who find ways to benefit from trying to collapse even the grimmest ones. In the trailer for The Forever Purge, the employees and owners of a ranch in the American Southwest are terrified to discover that some group aren't content with one Purge night and intent to extend the lawlessness forever. I'll be interested to see what their motivations are, both public and secret, for this extremely edgelord bloody coup.

Fear St. Part 1: 1994 (dir. Leigh Janiak)
Where: Netflix

This long-rumored/long-in-development adaptation of R.L. Stine's book series which began in 1989 with The New Girl looks amazing, frankly. The Fear Street series were a little more adult than Stine's generally better-known Goosebumps series, with more teen angst and melodrama as well as a bit more raw violence and gore. The approach being taken here is incredibly fun: in the "present" (1994) the town of Sunnyvale is beset by evil forces, something that only certain few residents, including the lone survivor of a massacre in 1971 (Gillian Jacobs) recognize as part of a cycle of evil that dates back to 1666. Director Leigh Janiak gained notoriety in 2014 with her feature debut Honeymoon, which balances a supernatural inciting event with interpersonal conflicts and questions very well. You can see why I'm very excited for her take on the Fear Street subject matter. Full disclosure: I actually only read the first FS book, when I was in Junior High and I recall almost none of it, so none of the trailer resonated especially strongly with me, but I know the series contains over 160 books (if my math is correct) so I imagine the plot is inspired by at least a few of them. This looks to be a lot of fun, very splattery and colorful and absolutely soaked in genre staples like ax wielding maniacs standing in a cabin doorway, puritan townspeople performing a ritual sacrifice and, my favorite, a kid in the '90s rapping to himself while playing Castlevania before getting an ominous phone call. Netflix is staggering the releases of the 3 installments, each set in one of the key eras, and I've listed them on the appropriate dates below, but this review, much like the trailer, covers all of them.

Monsters At Work (series)
Where: Disney+

This spin off series from the Monsters Inc. universe seems focused on the day to day operations within the actual Monsters Inc corporation. As you may recall, at the end of 2001's original Monsters Inc., Mike (Billy Crystal) and Sully (John Goodman) changed the status quo of the company, finding that laughter was a much more powerful energy source than screams of terror. After a brief prequel detour back to Mike & Sully's college years in 2013's Monsters University, we're finally going to see what Monsters Inc. looks like now that top "scarers" aren't getting prime gigs and are instead regulated to custodial/maintenance work. Crystal & Goodman are listed in the cast but I'd imagine they won't be the stars. We're more likely going to focus on new recruit Tyler Tuskmon (Ben Feldman) as he gets to know his custodial/maintenance co workers voiced by Mindy Kaling and Henry Winkler among others. This looks really cute (both the Monsters Inc. movies have a lot of adorable, fun design work and characters) and could be really interesting, but I have no clue from the trailer what the overall story of the show might be.

8th

Resident Evil: Infinite Darkness (series)
Where: Netflix

Resident Evil, for the unaware, is a genre-defining video game series that began in 1996 (that genre btw is "survival horror") and continues currently. Beginning in 2002, it also spawned a film franchise starring Mila Jovovich! As a franchise, Resident Evil is completely batnanas (that's batshit + bananas), which is part of the fun of it! It could just be your regular degular zombie series with some chemical compound as the catalyst, but that's been done to death, so the RE franchise just keeps getting weirder with more and bigger and stranger mutations, every flavor of body horror and, as of the 8th game in the series, Village, which was released only a few months ago, canonical vampires and werewolves! OK! The other calling card of an RE story is a labyrinthine backstory about greed and corruption. Every game and at least most of the movies spend at least half their time uncovering corruption on a global scale that has lead to the continued existence of the T-Virus, as I believe it is still called - it's been a while since I've personally checked into the series. It seems almost a no-brainer then that the series spend some time in Washington DC but this CGI animated series coming from Netflix is the first time I can recall seeing that locale in a Resident Evil project (as I said, I'm a bit out of the loop, so if I'm wrong, let me know in the comments). The series stars RE games semi-mainstays Leon Kennedy and Claire Redfield (voiced here by Nick Apostolides and Staphanie Panisello respectively) doing more of that uncovering that I mentioned - Claire even has a full on Pepe Silvio conspiracy board in one shot, and fighting various appropriately Resident Evil-y creatures: zombies, super rats and a guy who looks like if Swamp Thing fucked a garden salad who also has his heart on the outside. All that is totally cool, fine and to be expected but my issue with this series is that it's animated like a videogame cut scene. Maybe, if you're a kid whose grown up watching the dead-eyed refugees from the uncanny valley, and are used to trying to form emotional attachments to them, this might not be as big an issue. I personally cannot imagine many hells more interminable than being expected to watch more than a few minutes of this at a time.

9th

Black Widow (dir. Cate Shortland)
Where: Theaters

This one is a real head-scratcher. Ok. So the character Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) within the Marvel MCU film series is dead. She died in the last Avengers movie so that they could get all the space magic stones for their Nintendo Power Glove and save the day. So ...NOW is when they release her stand alone movie? Admittedly, this has been "in development" for, I dunno, roughly 50 years right? Basically someone at Marvel said they might make a Black Widow movie almost as soon as she showed up because OF COURSE THEY MIGHT. They MIGHT make a movie about literally ANY character that they think will put butts in seats because the whole thing is a crazy perpetual money machine. Obvs. Now having said that, some of this looks kinda fun. I like superheroes and comic books. I'm a sucker for spy flicks, espionage, gadgets and well choreographed fight scenes, which this trailer had a lot of! I'm not too familiar with Black Widow's comics-continuity backstory beyond her being a former soviet super spy who defected to join the Avengers eventually. In the movies (specifically Age of Ultron, I think?) they show some stuff about a Red Room where kids were trained in the espionage and mercenary arts from a young age. The BW solo movie seems to be dealing with a lot of that, as well as Natasha's (Johansson's) family? Which is weird because I thought she was an orphan, but maybe I'm just projecting that trope onto her story? Anyway, here we get references to Florence Pugh being her sister and Rachel Weisz being her mother, plus David Harbour is there so is he her papa?!?! What a talented family! The plot is a little hard to parse but it seems the person now running the Red Room, a skull-masked villain named Taskmaster (a personal favorite character of mine from the comics) needs to be taken down because he's not just turning the kids from the Red Room into stone cold killers but also brainwashing them which is, I guess, just a bit out of bounds. We get a lot of what you'd expect: vehicle chases and fisticuffs and the like and that's all fine. Where my eyes begin to glaze over is seeing one of those Big Action Set Pieces that are all just starting to feel very same-y to me because they're just actors on wires in a green screened environment. This one is Widow fighting Taskmaster as they both free-fall through the debris of some (maybe) SHIELD Helicarrier? Beyond that though sure, I'm reasonably interested. Also worth noting is that the movie is playing it close to the vest with who is playing Taskmaster. Maybe it's a big star? Maybe it's another character in the movie? Maybe it's something tied to the greater MCU? Who can say? ...Me. It's me. I'm Taskmaster in the Black Widow movie. Tell everyone.

Fear Street Part 2: 1978 (dir. Leigh Janiak)
Where: Netflix

The 2nd part of the Fear Street trilogy drops. This one is the guy-with-an-ax-at-a-summer-camp one. Can't wait!

11th

Wellington Paranormal (series)
Where: The CW / HBO Max the following day

This comedy series spins off of the, and I cannot stress this enough, mind-bendingly funny vampire film What We Do in the Shadows (2014) and follows some members of the local Paranormal branch of Wellington New Zealand police department. As they say, dryly and without  a hint of irony, they are "a bit like Mulder and Scully" from The X-Files: called to cases involving werewolves, ghosts, vampires, UFOs and other spookums. If you're a fan of the mockumentary style that WWDITS nailed - or rather staked - then this might be for you. The trailer is a bit scattered as far as giving me much insight into what the show is beyond monster-of-the-week shenanigans, but I'm still completely willing to check it out when it becomes available in the US (having already premiered outside the country back in February).

16th

Fear Street Part 3: 1666 (dir. Leigh Janiak)
Where: Netflix

The final installment of Leigh Janiak's Fear Street Triptych. This is the one set in a rural township in what looks like New England, but that's just a guess, and will presumably deal with the original evil that has cursed the land that would eventually become the town of Sunnyvale.

Space Jam: A New Legacy (dir. Malcolm D. Lee)
Where: Theaters

"The computer dude kidnapped my son." My sweet Satan this looks like torture. I'm not a fan of the original Space Jam, but one thing I can say for it is: at least its crappiness can be excused by being 25 years old and made at a time when studios still didn't TRY very hard when it came to "children's entertainment". That's kind of the reason Pixar broke so big was that they clearly respected animation, and children's intelligence, and the knowledge that some adults would have to sit through their movies, so why not make them, y'know, ...good? But here we are in 2021 with this awful looking hunk of junk where Don Cheadle (as the aforementioned "Computer Dude") kidnaps LeBron James' family to lure him into a basketball game. Word on the street is that his motivation is slightly deeper than that - he is trying to steal all of James' internet followers for some nefarious ends? But like, is that better? No. That sucks. A big selling point for this one is that Warners can use any of their intellectual properties in a sort of even-more-bullshit-nonsensical Ready Player One bid to stay relevant and keep people interested in their IP, but like for what and for whom? What person who would otherwise be uninterested in this movie, is going to go see it in theaters because Alex's droogs from A Clockwork Orange are in the background? You people know you can just WATCH THESE MOVIES ON YOUR OWN, yes? If you absolutely have some fundamental, DNA-deep desire to throw away the price of a couple of movie tickets, might I suggest you subscribe to the MovieJawn Patreon and get (I swear a fucking blood oath) MUCH MORE bang for your buck. Also Daffy Duck straight up steals a joke from a The Simpsons season 7 Treehouse of Horror segment Homer³. Eat shit, movie.

23rd

Snake Eyes (dir. Robert Schwentke)
Where: Theaters

Spun off from the G.I. Joe films (though presumably Paramount intends this to restart the franchise), based on the toy line popular throughout the '80s, this scratches a real similar itch for me as the Black Widow trailer: street-level action scenes (for the most part) and some well choreographed combat. The cast is stacked: Henry Golding, Iko Uwais, Samara Weaving & Peter Mensah to name a few stand-outs, and the direction looks solid (as much as one can tell from a trailer) but I'm hesitant on this one because it looks like it's half kung fu movie origin story stuff (rad) and half laying track for future G.I. Joe entries (ehh), so there's a good chance I'd enjoy it until it collapsed under the weight of its franchise. Having said that, it could lean into things and embrace getting bigger and crazier (like a certain street racing franchise famously has) but what are the odds? Also, famously, Snake Eyes (Golding) doesn't speak, at least not after becoming Snake Eyes, so if this does eventually get full on "Go Joe!", will he just be entirely silent, like Nic Cage (star of the other, unrelated Snake Eyes) in Willy's Wonderland? Interesting. Not hitting theaters for this, but I'll keep an eye out for it streaming definitely.

Masters of the Universe: Revelation (series)
Where: Netflix

In the '80s the Masters of the Universe toy line was hot. Musclebound and monster heavy, the toy line sparked the imagination of children everywhere (probably - I was only in Philadelphia but it was definitely happening here) and had a tie-in cartoon series that never QUITE lived up to its potential. Occasionally you'd get a few scenes or episodes that really scratched the itch of what the He-Man & MOTU toys were capable of in your mind, but not always. Now, from producer Kevin Smith comes a version of the series that looks a lot more like what pre-teen me envisioned, with swords, sorcery, lasers (yes, you can have it all), monsters and, at least as far as the trailer is concerned, a bumping '80s soundtrack? Wild times. This looks like it will re-establish the setting, characters and rules of the old cartoon - like how fit but scrawny Prince Adam has to raise his sword and say "I... have... the POWER!" to transform into beefy blonde daddy He-Man - but beyond that I dunno what the plot might be. Now that I think about it, I don't know what the plot of the original series was either. I mean Skeletor (voiced here by Mark Hamill) was trying to do evil things because he was the villain, but like, to what end? Anyway, I always thought the He-Man/MOTU characters had some of the best, craziest designs and they all seem to be floating around in the trailer. Except maybe Ram Man, a toy whose legs you could compress into his abdomen which then sprung out, launching him to great heights of about 3 inches. He was more impressive in our heads. Getting back to the voice cast though: Sarah Michelle Gellar, Kevin Conroy, Lena Headey, Diedrich Bader, Henry Rollins, Alicia Silverstone, Stephen Root, Kevin Michael Richardson, Tony Todd, Justin Long and, most excitingly: Downtown Griffy Newms from the Black Check podcast as Orko, the tiny, weird magical wizard thing! Blank it? Thank it. Smith also recently said that the first 5 episodes were inspired by films from the same era as the toys/series: Superman 2, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Batman, Hellraiser and of course the Masters of the Universe movie starring Dolph Lundgren and Frank Langella.

30th

The Green Knight (dir. David Lowery)
Where: Theaters

Finally, after what seems an eternity, David Lowery's The Green Knight, based on the Arthurian legend, is actually coming to theaters. I enjoy some of Lowery's other film work, but I'm a big fan of a lot of these older mythologies and stories, especially because they're so out of public consciousness that you can do a LOT with them as far as reimagining/reinterpreting them goes. And that's kind of what it looks like is going on here. The story of the Green Knight is that one day a Green Knight appeared and offered to let any one strike him with his axe so long as they agreed to receive a blow back in exactly one year. Sir Gawain beheaded the knight, who then picked up his head, as one does, and basically said "See ya in a year" and left. One year later, Gawain sets off to find the knight so he can uphold his end of the bargain and along the way a lot of other weird things happened but the point was that Gawain was an honorable man. The trailer for Lowery's The Green Knight is wall-to-wall with amazing imagery and should absolutely be seen. It also has already spawned a Dungeons & Dragons style tabletop game, which I have played and written about and just through and through seems like something I surely WILL enjoy. This one I will be hitting theaters for, not just because I'm sure I can see it in a smaller, less packed, quieter theater than most of the large tentpole-y flicks above.

SPOTLIGHT

Not necessarily new, but recommended.

2nd

Bill & Ted Face the Music (dir. Dean Parisot)
Where: HULU

The long gap sequel to the Bill & Ted franchise, which started with 1989's Excellent Adventure and was followed by 1991's Bogus Journey, Face the Music catches up with Bill S. Preston Esq. (Alex Winter) and Ted Theodore Logan (Keanu Reeves), the two slacker goofballs prophesied to bring unity to the galaxy with their music. They're now grown men, doting fathers, diligent husbands and ...still haven't brought unity to the galaxy, though not for lack of trying! You don't really need to be familiar with Bill & Ted to understand this movie, stuff just happens. Yeah they have access to a time travelling phone booth. They're buds with Death (William Sadler) though things are a bit strained since he quit the band to go solo. They're wives are princesses they met in medieval times who now go to couples' couples therapy because Bill & Ted have trouble separating themselves from ...themselves. You just gotta go with it. If you do, you'll be rewarded with a genuinely touching film about what it means to "be important" and what exactly "family" is. Check out the Hate Watch/Great Watch podcast Episode 48, where we discuss Face the Music with a brief refresher of the first two.

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And there you have it. I kept the SPOTLIGHT section to one flick because July is already a pretty stuffed month for EOINA appropriate flicks. I hope I helped guide you to something you'll enjoy, or to avoid something you wouldn't. Either way, let me know: reach out on social media or leave a comment below!

Thanks as always to MovieJawn for the hosting and posting. If you, reading this, would like to thank them, there is a MovieJawn Patreon, as I mentioned above. For as little as $5 a month, you get quite a bit of bonus material with more on the way all the time! It's worth it. Thanks to you as well for reading this and if you're not sick of my opinions, why not check out the latest episode of Hate Watch/Great Watch which by the time you read this will most likely be on the Muay Thai action film Ong-Bak! Until next time: Long Live the Movies!

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This piece was written for MovieJawn, a fabulous site where you can find tons of other excellent movie-centric writings, a shop where you can subscribe to the quarterly physical zine, or listen to me on the  Hate Watch / Great Watch  podcast! Support the MovieJawn Patreon here!
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"F9: THE FAST SAGA" (2021)

"F9: The Fast Saga"
Directed by Justin Lin
Written by Daniel Casey & Justin Lin (screenplay)
Starring Vin Diesel, John Cena, Jordana Brewster, Michelle Rodriguez, Tyrese Gibson, Ludacris, Sung Kang, Nathalie Emmanuel, Helen Mirren, etc.
Running time 2 hours, 23 minutes
MPAA rated PG-13 "for sequences of violence and action, and language"

By: Hunter Bush

They let Helen Mirren drive! THE PROPHECY HAS BEEN FULFILLED!

Hi. I'm Hunter, a late-in-life convert to the world of The Fast & The Furious. Back in 2001, I was a young man trying to define myself; to figure out who I am. Not an uncommon situation, but I was going about it all wrong. Instead of trying any- and everything, I was carefully limiting what I exposed myself to; instead of joining a group of my friends who were going to see the first Fast & Furious, to see if I would like it, I declined because "What if I DID like it? Would I have to become a Car Guy? Etc., etc." Silly, teenage stuff.

To be honest, I probably wouldn't have loved it. Don't get me wrong, it's a perfectly effective car racing-based actioner (and it gets more rewarding when you've seen more of the franchise) but it wouldn't have blown back the hair of 18-year-old me. A few years later, however, I similarly turned down an invite to see Fast & Furious 3: Tokyo Drift in theaters with roughly that same group of friends, under the reasonable and defensible ground that I hadn't seen the first two. I self-fulfilling prophecy that assured I missed what is one of my favorite installments on the series.

I had unknowingly done myself a terrible disservice.

Toyko Drift flippin' rules! As a film, it's the first in the Fast Franchise to start to lean on the wall a little bit; to push the tonal boundaries that would otherwise have (probably - this is all speculation) found the franchise becoming another Direct To Video staple. You'd catch one of the first Fast & Furiouses on TV, wonder what happened to that series, and end up down a Wikipedia rabbit hole where you found out that the 11th one was released a year ago and starred some "Really? Him?" -level celebrity like Joe Rogan or something (shudder to think).

As I said, this is all speculative, but it's an educated guess based on my lifetime watching flicks. The first one comes out, does well, gets a sequel (from a notable director - R.I.P. John Singleton) but the sequel doesn't have a LOT to do with the first one. It's a thematic sequel, tied to the original by one actor (R.I.P. Paul Walker) and a word cloud of nebulous concepts such as "cars", "undercover cop", and "crime". It also does well and gets a sequel: Tokyo Drift. And that's where Justin Lin comes in (he's the director for F9, which is why I'm taking this walk - be patient).

Tokyo Drift has, ostensibly, nothing to do with the previous two installments besides similarly nebulous conceptual ties (until it does) but it's just the shot in the arm the franchise needed. As I said, it plays with the tone, adding a heightened melodrama, stylish direction, larger than life characters and tons of amazing car action that usually ends in equally amazing destruction! There were car stunts and crashes in the previous flicks, but never so lovingly depicted. Y'know how people used to use the phrase "food porn" to describe sumptuously-photographed pictures of your dinner? Well this would be "car crash porn" if that wasn't already the concept for a Cronenberg movie. There's just something so satisfying in watching these gorgeously designed and decorated cars turn into modern art sculpture and then burst into flames.

Lin took over directing duties on the next 3 Fasts & Furiouses, including Fast Five (the fifth one, obvs) which is probably still my favorite because it is THE true turning point for the franchise. Fast Five is the moment in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy opens the door from her sepia farmhouse into the technicolor spectacle of Oz; when the franchise goes from a reasonably straight vehicular action series to being a Saturday morning cartoon. All it takes is one vault heist. Do you remember the moment in Speed when they manage to jump a city bus over the gap in an incomplete highway and you're just kind of like "Sure" because you're so invested and also you're just having too much fun to care? The vault heist in Fast Five is like that, but for about 20 minutes. The laws of realistic physics stop applying (though the sequence is pretty much entirely achieved through practical effects) and you're left with Pure Cinema. Something is happening that I know intellectually to be impossible to the point of comedy but not only do I believe my eyes, but I actually care about it all. Like I said: Pure Cinema.

After that, the franchise is fully a Saturday morning cartoon (specifically M.A.S.K.) but with more unironic heart than almost any other franchise I can think of. Not just of the "from one character to another character" variety either. The folks making these movies want us to enjoy them! They want us to cheer and clap when our favorite characters show up, and to get teary eyed when we think they might not make it, and then to cheer and clap through teary eyes when they do! In a world where talking about Star Wars around the dinner table is quickly getting to be just as verboten a topic as religion or politics, it's nice to have a franchise clap a hand on your shoulder and welcome you with a tall cool (franchise staple) Corona, y'know?

How much you, personally, will enjoy F9 depends on which side of that sepia farmhouse door you like your movies on. And unlike the Star Wars conversation, there are no wrong answers. If you're looking purely for car racing and realistic vehicular action though, you're going to be disappointed. The Fasts & Furiouses have long been flirting with what I think of as Car Superpowers: not only the ability to make cars do things that are highly unlikely (which happens) and not just having them do things that seem down right impossible (lotta that) but also to manipulate the cars as though they were an extension of themselves. Case in point: in more than one of these movies, Dom (Vin Diesel) will "catch" someone with his car. They will fall, say, 70 feet but rather than hitting the hard concrete, they land on a nice, soft car. And we are to believe this is *better* and, y'know what? It is. Or at least I do.

If you're someone who is on board with all the craziness of the recent sequels - the big action set pieces and such - F9 has them in bunches. If you've seen a trailer or two, you've got a decent idea of what's coming: explosive chase sequences, dangerous and hilarious fun with industrial strength electro magnets, some kinda enormous un-explodable military transport, etc. but seeing it all executed is tremendous fun.

F9 is subtitled "The Fast Saga" and while it would be obvious to say that this film is about "Fambly" - because they're all about "Fambly" - this is still the one most concerned with the concept of legacy. It's also the most flashback-heavy installment and while that necessitates the scenes set in the here & now be a bit exposition heavy at first, eventually things settle into just being an amusement park ride. Will you go into this thinking that it's faintly ridiculous that Dom has NEVER mentioned having a brother Jakob (John Cena) before? Maybe, but once you're in these flashbacks, seeing how things played out, you'll at least somewhat buy the logic of why he's never been brought up. Of course, that's the point, but it's really well done.

During the lockdown, my house watched all the Fast & Furious films, finishing up with the Hobbs & Shaw spin-off and Fast 8: The F8 of the Furious in May of this year, so all these things are quite fresh in my mind. So when we see young Dom (Vinnie Bennett) straight out of jail, setting himself on the path to becoming the champion street racer from the first film, I noticed that the handful of kids standing behind him looked a lot like Letty, Mia, Jesse and Vince, his crew from that first flick. But there's no ham-handed close-ups of them, no dialogue exchanged between them, none of that hokey shit that most other franchises wouldn't be able to restrain themselves from doing.

Restraint is an odd thing to be talking about in regards to F9, a film where Vin Diesel rights an overturned truck as it rolls down a hill using controlled explosions; where smashing your car bodily into the side of a mountain and rolling 30 times is not only the preferred scenario, but a totally fine and survivable thing to do; where Roman (Tyrese) posits that he and the entirety of the crew are in fact immortals because of the things they have survived, but here I am. That restraint is so unusual and so refreshing. It really feels as though not only is the franchise in good hands with Justin Lin but that Lin respects the fans enough NOT to do that kind of thing.

That thing I said at the start about Helen Mirren getting to drive? That happened because she was very vocal about wanting to drive a car in one of these flicks and thus the fans wanted that for her. So Lin & co. delivered. But if you just give fans what they think they want without really caring about it, it's pandering and feels hollow when you watch the movie. Like seeing a kid in a supermarket throw a tantrum because they want a candy bar until the exhausted parent doesn't care anymore and there's just some red faced tot with tears running down their face and a chocolate bar jammed in their maw. Justin Lin (as well as co-screenwriter Daniel Casey) want the same things as the fans. They want Helen Mirren to drive; they want that kid to have that candy bar.

At the end of a long day, after all the dumb adult responsibilities are out of the way, we all deserve a treat. It could be a candy bar, or a Corona, or two hours spent with a bunch of goofballs and badasses in nitro burning funny cars saving the world and celebrating with a BBQ.

F9: THE FAST SAGA  is in theaters June 25th.




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This piece was written for MovieJawn, a fabulous site where you can find tons of other excellent movie-centric writings, a shop where you can subscribe to the quarterly physical zine, or listen to me on the  Hate Watch / Great Watch  podcast! Support the MovieJawn Patreon here!

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