Flasz On Film

I think it goes without saying that the Fast & Furious franchise prides itself on its innate ridiculousness. In fact, staunch defenders of the series often default to a position of saying that without its brainless bombasticity, there would be no point in keeping it alive because people flock to see those movies to switch off their brains and have fun.  

Absolutely no problem with that. In fact, I fully approve of movies like that. I don’t mind ridiculous stunts, dragging vaults across streets like a wheel-less chariot, overpowered electromagnets, submarine battles or sending cars into space. I cherish those ideas, just as I cherish the utter ridiculousness of stuntmanship involved in executing those – frequently quite long – action set pieces. I also don’t mind the dorky and earnest opera happening under the bonnet of this series, or that these movies are as economic with character death as politicians are with the truth.  

However, there’s one aspect of this entire franchise whose utter preposterousness drives me up the wall and it is the convention adopted to title its instalments whose number has now crossed over into the two-digit realm. For the sake of refreshing your memory, here’s how these titles break down: 

1. The Fast and the Furious 

2. 2 Fast 2 Furious 

3. The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift 

4. Fast & Furious 

5. Fast Five (aka Fast 5; aka Fast & Furious 5: Rio Heist) 

6. Fast & Furious 6 (titled on screen as Furious 6) 

7. Furious 7 (titled on screen as Fast & Furious 7) 

8. The Fate of the Furious (aka F8, aka Fast & Furious 8) 

9. Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw (aka Hobbs & Shaw; spin-off) 

10. F9 (aka F9: The Fast Saga; aka Fast and Furious 9: The Fast Saga) 

11. Fast X 

There’s no dancing around it: the titling convention across the series, whichever way you slice it, is a total unbridled mess. You can only imagine the idea of owning these movies on physical media as individual releases (and I bet you money there are people out there who suffer in silence with this issue) and then attempting to keep them on the shelf both close together and within the parameters of a rudimentary alphabetical order. It’s impossible. Now, maybe this is where you look at your shelf and see absolutely no problems keeping these movies together in the order of release, but I have multiple hundreds of Blu-rays I need to keep track of and the idea of having to deal with inconsistently titled movie franchises defying the strict organization rules imposed upon my entire collection contributes to elevating my cortisol levels. Without a box set keeping all those movies tied up in one location, you are doomed.  

But maybe there is a method to this madness and there is an underlying pattern beneath these differentially titled entries in the Fast & Furious franchise. And I have truly spent much more time thinking about this than I think is remotely acceptable, only to give up in the end. The fact these movies seem to all be titled as though to openly refuse to acknowledge any series continuity is an artistic choice, and at this point it may be a part of the self-awareness that crept into the series, similar to how nobody stays dead in the franchise for more than three movies, how Tyrese Gibson’s character always insists on walking out on the mission after hearing what needs to be done, or how everyone openly pretends that Paul Walker’s character is alive and well but chooses to be too busy to attend the Family™ barbecues and whatnot. 

In a way, looking at these disparate titles makes me think of the way Microsoft has been historically dealing with naming their Windows products. After starting strong with Windows 1.x, Windows 2.x and Windows 3.x, then they decided to acknowledge the year of the release with Windows 95, 98 and 2000, only to suffer a temporary lapse of logic with Windows Me (because both 2000 and Me were released in the same year but Windows 2000 was working on the NT architecture, so it was different), and then to completely fall of the wagon with successive releases of Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7, 8, 8.1 and then – finally – Windows 10… because 9 is not a real number, am I right? Now, if you look at all those products in isolation, you probably can find an answer as to why they are named the way they are, be it because they were released in 1995 or 2000, or maybe because the upgrade wasn’t substantial enough (8.1 vs 8). But why skip Windows 9? Christ only knows. Also, as you pull out and assume a more holistic overview of the entire range, you’ll see that these locally logical decisions do not gel together one bit. 

Similar deal over here because the titling convention of the Fast & Furious franchise seems to follow very localized cultural whims and reflects connotations only to one movie at a time (two at best). So, the 2 Fast 2 Furious is explained by way of noting it was popular at the time to play with titles in such a way. Tokyo Drift is what it is because it takes place in Japan. Fast & Furious is titled as such because it reinvents the series. Fast 5 and Furious 6 (as it is titled in the film itself) work together in a cute way but make no sense otherwise. And I can only imagine there is a logical connection between The Fate of the Furious (aka F8, and The F8 of the Furious) and F9 by way of using the same convention twice. But, again, like a range of Microsoft Windows products, they make absolutely no sense as a coherent series of titles. They are a veritable mishmash. 

So, I took it upon myself to maybe suggest an alternative titling convention. Granted, if you want to be lazy about it, you can just retitle everything as Fast & Furious 1-10. You can even leave Hobbs & Shaw (or Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw) in peace and you’ll be fine. But that’s not fun at all. Therefore, I decided to apply a different convention, which I refer to as the “Tenet convention” or the “Palindrome convention”, which assumes there is a plane of symmetry in the middle of the series. That way, I get to use the already circulating titles and alternative titles while needing only to change some of the later entries. It looks as follows: 

1. The Fast and the Furious 

2. 2 Fast 2 Furious 

3. The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift 

4. Fast & Furious 

5. Fast Five 

6. Fast & Furious 6 

7. Furious 7 

8. Fast & Furious 8 

9. The Fast and Furious 9: The Fast Saga 

10. 2 Furious 2 B Fast 

11. The Furious and the Fast or The Faith and the Family 

Now, as you can imagine, I took the liberty and imagined what the next instalment to the series would look like and – fingers crossed – assumed it would be the final one. Thus, the Fast & Furious franchise would complete with eleven official contiguous entries (eleven is a nice number for the purposes of symmetry – 5-1-5 – and it is a prime number too… and who doesn’t like prime numbers?). As a result, instead of F9 we’d have a mirror image of Tokyo Drift, instead of Fast X we get a tongue-in-cheek play on the second movie and the final entry is either the flipped version of the original or, what I personally like the most, the epic conclusion to the saga – The Faith and the Family whose title signifies importance and finality. 

Alternatively, we can ditch the palindromes altogether and commit to localized microtrends, which means using Fast and Furious 7 instead of Furious 7 and Furious 6 instead of Fast and Furious 6 to forge a sequence of Fast 5 into Furious 6 into Fast and Furious 7 (one mini trend) and then going with F8, F9 and FX. Then, the future movie would be either FXI or – and I like it even more – FXX because it makes no sense anyway (logic has never been strong with this series) and at least in my head I see how at the end of FXX Dominic Toretto loses his memory and wakes up as Xander Cage, thus making this entire series a prequel to xXx. Which was also directed by Rob Cohen who helmed the original The Fast and the Furious by the way. Perfect. And stupid. But still… perfect, nonetheless. 

However, being completely honest, we can just as well leave these titles alone. After all, there is stunning consistency to their inconsistency as each title seems to be from a different family (sic!), so it only follows to uphold this tradition and make sure that no other entry would ever slot into a trend of any kind. As I postulated in the opening paragraphs of this text – there may be logic to this madness and sometimes complete stochasticity is a kind of predictably definable behaviour. So, to reliably suggest the title for the upcoming instalment in this franchise, we have to take a holistic view of everything that came before it and propose something that has not been tried. For instance, F&F11 – The Final Chapter, as such an abbreviation has not been deployed before, a dash has not ever been used and we have the use of the word “chapter”. We could also go the Harry Potter route and go with Fast X – Part 2, especially given how Fast X ends on a cliffhanger. And then, if the filmmakers still insist on following with another movie, as they might as well do anyway because you don’t butcher a cash cow, you can always tack on a subtitle to the subtitle and go out in a blaze of ridiculous glory – John Wick-style – by appending a Latin proverb at the end – Familia supra omnia. Family over everything. 

Prosecution rests.