http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=wjy7RWV3JHw
OK, so you might think you're done with that trailer, but I implore you to watch it twelve, perhaps thirteen more times to pick up every nuance. You probably noticed the part where our fearless heroes ripped a plane out of the sky with a car-mounted grappling hook so Vin Diesel could mount a daring escape by exploding out of the plane's nose. But, perhaps you missed this scene where Vin Diesel hoists a man into the air so The Rock can apparently fly at him like Superman and DESTROY HIS FACE:
Or this split-second shot where The Rock sits in a helicopter next to none other than female MMA fighter Gina Carano:
Alright, I'll let you mull over all this for a little while, but when you're ready I have an in-depth analysis of the series, film by film.
The Fast and the Furious: It's startling to see the humble beginnings that can kick-off such an epoch-defining series - the first movie to bear the two 'F's is little more than Point Break with cars. Paul Walker is Johnny Utah, going undercover as an aspiring driver in order to bust Vin Diesel's illicit ring of illegal street racing. Along the way he falls in love with Vin Diesel's gloriously be-eyebrowed sister, gets into all sorts of hijinks involving uninteresting side characters, and eventually lets Patrick Swayze surf the biggest wave the world has ever seen. This movie isn't great.
2 Fast 2 Furious: The Police Force frowns on officers making friends with criminals and letting them escape, so newly-made fugitive Paul Walker street races down to Miami and quickly rises to the top of an illegal street racing ring. The law catches up with him, however, and offers him a deal: work undercover as a street rac- OK, I think you get where I'm going with this. Despite a title that will live in infamy, this movie isn't so hot either. It introduces recurring characters Tyrese Gibson and Ludacris (don't bother learning their character names), but Vin Diesel's absence makes this a sad outing.
The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift: Alright, so here's where things start getting good. Tokyo Drift is a coming-of-age story where our hero learns the secret to life: ALWAYS BE DRIFTING. Kicked out of his American school and sent to live in Japan, he discovers that he can drive his car sideways to solve any and every hardship that comes his way. These include, but are not limited to, girls not liking him, the fact that he speaks no Japanese, and a Yakuza boss who wants him dead. That guy's all ready to torture what'shisface to death at the end of the movie, but when he sees this sick drift down a twisty mountain road he calms right down.
The best part about Tokyo Drift is that it is actually set in the future of the series. It's like a pro-active finale to an ongoing series. There's a character who is introduced and dies in Tokyo Drift, but who goes on to appear in all subsequent F&F movies, so every movie he's in has to slot in before Tokyo Drift. Every new Fast and Furious movie pushes Tokyo Drift further and further into the future. By the way, that character's name: Han Seoul-Oh.
Fast & Furious: Tokyo Drift is a fascinating movie, but it's only linked to the previous movies by a cameo from Vin Diesel at the very end. For fans of the series' rich lore, the fourth movie is where it all comes together. We return to our old friends from the first movie, who, under Vin Diesel's guiding hand, have become an international band of high-speed, street-racing criminals. At the beginning of the movie we see them executing a cunning plan to steal tanks of fuel from a fuel tanker in motion, a heist that culminates in Vin Diesel driving a car underneath a cartwheeling fuel trailer as it flips down a hill.
Meanwhile, Paul Walker has inexplicably been made an FBI agent, and is tasked with going undercover to infiltrate a ring of illegal street racing. These street racers actually drug-runners this time, using a secret tunnel through a mountain to smuggle drugs across the US border. Paul Walker shows up to race for a place on the team, and is surprised to see he'll be competing against Vin Diesel, who wants to get at the drug tycoon because he killed Vin Diesel's girlfriend, Michelle Rodriguez. Cars are raced, things explode, and at one point Vin Diesel airjacks the bad guy's car in what I can only imagine was an homage to that game he made called Wheelman. He just dives out of his own car and into the bad guy's; it's pretty fantastic. Anyway, Vin Diesel is caught and sentenced to life in prison, but the police make the mistake of driving him to prison and that leads us to...
Fast Five: Often voted the greatest movie of all time, Fast Five begins with the gang using cars to spring Vin Diesel from his prison bus. Oh, did I mention that Paul Walker is a full-on criminal in this one? Anyway, after a short reunion they concoct an imaginative plan to use some cars to steal some cars from a car-carrying train. This is botched by an untrustworthy freelancer, and Vin Diesel and Paul Walker manage to draw the ire of not only Brazil's greatest crime lord (Bucho from Desperado), but also THE ROCK! The Rock is some kind of internationally-licensed government agent, an expert in tracking and bringing in all manner of criminal scum. If you have a problem, and you need it solved loudly and sweatily, The Rock is your guy.
Now it's up to our fearless heroes to plan a fiendish scheme to steal all of Bucho's money out from under the nose of the entire Brazilian police force while fending off parkour-attacks from The Rock's posse. You might not think they'd find time to fit a few drag races in there, but you're obviously not familiar with the series. The Rock eventually finds their secret hideout, and he and Vin Diesel put on the kind of amazing fight scene that only two ridiculous sides-of-beef-in-T-shirts can manage. They basically demolish an entire building with eachother's bodies, deafening entire suburbs with the meaty claps of their sweat-slickened hides. It's pretty great.
The events shortly afterwards defy explanation, but suffice it to say that The Rock comes 'round to Vin Diesel's point of view and decides to abandon a life of upholding the law to help Vin Diesel steal all the money. Vin Diesel does this - how else? - with cars; specifically by dragging an entire bank vault through Rio de Janeiro from two blacked-out Dodge Challengers. It swings around like a hundred-ton, sharp-cornered death-conker, destroying dozens of police cars and buildings, and eventually Vin Diesel executes the most incredible flipping catapult manoeuvre that leads me to believe his hidden superpower is inhuman mathematical genius but only when behind the wheel of a car.
At the end of the movie, during the credits in fact, Eva Mendes comes all the way back from 2 Fast 2 Furious to tell The Rock that Michelle Rodriguez ISN'T ACTUALLY DEAD AFTER ALL, which is apparently where Fast & Furious 6 picks up. It seems like The Rock is now tracking down another team of car-based criminals, and only Vin Diesel's crew can help him. Our gang has basically become The A-Team now, ready to go with improbable car-related schemes for whoever can track them down.
I guess what I'm saying here is how excited are all of you for the next movie? World-encompassingly? Perhaps I should also mention that Fast & Furious 6 is being shot back-to-back with a yet-untitled seventh movie.
