Directrospective: 2 FAST 2 FURIOUS (2003)

Notes on the films of American director John Singleton.

I’d seen most but not all of the FAST & FURIOUS films until earlier this year, and once the pandemic hit, their special brand of sentimental bombast made a full series rewatch sound perfect. I was charmed by the first film’s small-scale action and loved the over-the-top physically unbounded universe established by the later entries. The second, third, and fourth films - 2 FAST 2 FURIOUS, THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS: TOKYO DRIFT, and FAST & FURIOUS - were all new to me as of a few months ago.

I knew three things about this one: Vin Diesel wasn’t in it, it was generally considered the worst in the series, and it has one of cinema’s great titles. Now having seen it, I can’t disagree with any of those points. Especially not the first one.

We’ll get to the John Singleton of it all a bit later, but while it’s far from a perfect film, I think much of what makes the later films in the series great was established here. Trashterpieces like FAST FIVE and FURIOUS 7 owe much more to this film than to the first.

Let’s sit with the title for a minute. There’s no getting around it: the title is insanely stupid. It’s so goddamn stupid it’s beautiful. Instantly iconic, irreproducible, evocative yet totally meaningless, it’s a gem of popular culture for which I will be forever grateful. Its very stupidity led to one of my very favorite things about the FAST movies, which is their consistently inconsistent naming conventions. You can’t call the next one 3 FAST 3 FURIOUS, because the word “three” isn’t a cute homophone like “two”/“too.” The next film also needed its own naming convention as it was mostly a spinoff (although it would end up becoming a crucial part of the larger series continuity), with a very brief cameo from Vin Diesel, a cast member of THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS who very conspicuously did not appear in 2 FAST 2 FURIOUS. No two films in the series thus far – THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS, 2 FAST 2 FURIOUS, THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS: TOKYO DRIFT, FAST & FURIOUS, FAST FIVE, FAST & FURIOUS 6, FURIOUS 7, THE FATE (sometimes styled as “F8”) OF THE FURIOUS, spin-off FAST & FURIOUS PRESENTS: HOBBS & SHAW, and upcoming main series entry F9 – have shared exactly the same title structure. The only rule for naming a new FAST movie is that you have to come up with a new rule. FAST & FURIOUS and FAST & FURIOUS 6 are superficially close, but I would argue that these are some of the most disparate titles of all. The latter is a sequel to FAST FIVE, not to FAST & FURIOUS directly. The return to the ampersanded, article-free version of the original film’s name implies that we’ve all been calling that film FAST & FURIOUS, which would mean that the film now titled FAST & FURIOUS should really be called FAST & FURIOUS 4. But it shouldn’t be called that, because upon its release it was the first film to be called “FAST & FURIOUS.” Thus the two ampersand films imply a completely separate franchise with only two entries, of which the first is the first and the second is the sixth, along with a spin-off which I guess the first(/fourth) film is “presenting” the same way Quentin Tarantino will “present” the U.S. release of a Chinese film he liked. When pressed to give an official name to the entire street-racing-cum-car-based-international-black-ops series, they’ve settled on “The FAST Saga,” as if the 2001 POINT BREAK in cars movie about a cop infiltrating a street racing gang to find out who’s been hijacking trucks full of consumer electronics was always intended as the beginning of an epic tale of cybernetic bioterrorists and modified tanks racing Soviet subs across Antarctica. That name also suggests that the seventh and eighth installments, which omit the word “fast” from their titles, don’t count. It’s sheer madness, and it brings me great joy. None of this would be possible had Universal not painted themselves into a corner with the magnificently dumb 2 FAST 2 FURIOUS.

On to the film itself and Singleton’s contributions thereto. 2 FAST moves the action from the Los Angeles setting of the first film (and many of Singleton’s, incidentally) to Miami, Florida, probably in part to justify the absence of Diesel’s Echo Park street race king, Dom Toretto. Former cop Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker) has been hiding out there after he let Toretto escape in a beautiful gesture of homosocial love at the end of that movie. He’s been hanging out with gregarious garage owner and race promoter Tej Parker (Chris “Ludacris” Bridges, an absolute treasure) and making money being very good at street racing. But the law soon catches up with him. It turns out Brian is once again the only cop(-adjacent person) who stands a chance of infiltrating a different street racing-centered criminal organization, and the FBI needs his help to take down Argentinian drug kingpin Carter Verone (Cole Hauser, who is actually qualified to play Argentinian because he was a neo-Nazi in Singleton’s HIGHER LEARNING). Brian agrees to do it, but only if he can bring his childhood friend Roman Pearce (BABY BOY’s Tyrese Gibson, credited here by first name only) and have both their criminal records expunged. Roman blames Brian for the arrest that got him several years of jail time. It’s later revealed that Brian’s guilt over what happened to Roman had a lot to do with why he let Toretto go at the end of THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS. As far as justifications for why a buddy movie sequel fully replaces one of the original buddies, I’m not mad at this. John Singleton didn’t write the movie anyway.

His greatest gift to the franchise must be the casting of Ludacris and Tyrese, consistent with Singleton’s habit of casting hip-hop musicians in acting roles. Tej and Roman have no relationship to the events of the first movie whatsoever outside of their friendship with Brian, but they set two wonderful precedents for the megafranchise to come. The first is that it doesn’t matter if your movie was bad, or had nothing to do the Toretto gang, or your character doesn’t have anything unique to offer the team, or you were the villain, or you died – if you popped onscreen, you’re family, and you’re in this franchise for life. The casualness with which later installments hand-wave away strict continuity if it means that a character we like gets to be in this movie, too, is lovely. Beginning with FAST FIVE, which folds Tej and Roman and TOKYO DRIFT’s Han Lue (Sung Kang) into Toretto’s team like they were always there, the FAST movies pull off this magic trick where somehow combining all your favorite foods into one bowl – pizza and mint chip ice cream and sour gummy worms and Diet Coke and pumpkin pie – isn’t disgusting and is actually great. Without the undeniable charm of Ludacris and Tyrese in this one, that might not have happened.

Tej and Roman also provide some welcome representation for Black people in the series. Despite the first film’s L.A. setting, it focuses almost entirely on the city’s white, Latinx and East Asian populations (Diesel, whose ethnicity is deliberately ambiguous although he has hinted that his biological father was Black, plays Toretto as at least partially Latino, and Jordana Brewster, who plays his sister, is half-white and half-Brazilian). A large part of the FAST franchise’s international appeal is due to the diversity of its cast, which is unusually inclusive for big Hollywood tentpole movies. Following Paul Walker’s death, the team was without a white member until Jason Statham joined for THE FATE OF THE FURIOUS. That’s all thanks to Tej and Roman.

That in 1400 words or so on 2 FAST I have barely discussed the film itself is not lost on me. It’s entertaining enough, if fairly forgettable. The thing I remember most from it is a particularly brutal death that feels of a piece with the increasingly cold-blooded violence in Singleton’s films post-SHAFT. Having been entrapped into a fixed racing audition to make undercover agents Brian and Roman’s infiltration of Verone’s operation look more legitimate, an unnamed driver in a red Mustang gets duped by the two heroes into driving between two merging 18-wheelers. He tries to position himself exactly in the middle so he doesn’t get hit, but it’s too tight and he begins to ping-pong back and forth from one truck to another. Quickly, he’s knocked sideways hard enough that his car gets stuck in the space underneath the trailer between the two axles, and is dragged for a few seconds before the back wheels of the big rig find purchase on the Mustang’s body. His car is sucked under several tons of rubber and steel and whatever the truck is hauling and explodes in a shower of glass and metal. He’s clearly very, very dead. It doesn’t seem like Brian and Roman notice this or ever find out that it happened, that they caused the violent death of a man who was tricked into participating in a race that only took place so that they could win it. It’s horrifying, and it shows a side of Singleton I don’t love seeing. 

I’m pretty sure that’s the side that directed FOUR BROTHERS. More on that tomorrow.