The Fast and the Furious (2001)

It’s nice to go back to the smaller Fast & Furious films in the same way that it’s nice to go back to the first John Wick: as much as the later movies matter to me or work beyond their function as a machine that manufactures dopamine, there’s something almost sweet about seeing something so big and gleefully stupid as a baby, as if their exploits could almost happen in our world.

With Fast & Furious, there’s also the twin issues of Paul Walker’s death and the studio mandate that every globally successful action franchise needs to take on the self-replicating anticharm of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I love these movies, many of them have pulled me out of some pretty serious spirals, but after Fast Five the stakes of them became hilariously apocalyptic, and post-Walker, increasingly happy to gaze at their own navel between setpieces. Once everything became about family, nothing felt like it was about family anymore.

The Fast and the Furious is probably the least of the first five films, but it’s the one I return to the most. Saying that it’s the cleanest, most internally logical entry in the series feels obvious, but that’s what makes it so compelling: there isn’t a minute of this film that hasn’t been expanded upon in at least one of the movies that follows, so it’s a pure blast of what you go to a Fast & Furious for: slick car stunts, Y2K street racing aesthetics, and the charisma of its stars, each one of them playing it like they’re in a Shakespearian tragedy about man’s lust for the 10-second car.

You can see why Vin Diesel became a star (but not, like, a huge one, at least not outside of these movies), why Paul Walker became a star (but really only in these movies), and why Michelle Rodriguez is in every other action movie of the era. She and Diesel have actual chemistry as a couple. Walker likes tuna fish sandwiches without the crust. Ja Rule yells “MENAGEEEEEEEEEE” when he loses a street race. It’s Point Break for a society poisoned by nü-metal. It’s one of the peak achievements of American cinema. I cry every time I see it. Some of that is because I wished I lived my life a quarter mile at a time. A lot of that is because this is the only film in which any of these characters actually do.