Fast and Farcical: Having a laugh at Hollywood's street racing movie franchise

Maybe you’re spiritually enlightened and have been spending your weekends during lockdown engaged in healthy and constructive pursuits like yoga, meditation or learning the art of origami and calligraphy.

Or maybe you’re a 'gym boet' jacked on steroids and foaming at the mouth, spending your hours running angrily in circles in your garden or on your balcony as you try to prepare for an imaginary fight with “any oke that checks you skeef”.

Then there’s guys like me —  Gen X slackers who are quite happy to do absolutely nothing but lie on a couch watching movie after movie with no break, except to eat another burger or replenish the snack bowl. What my mom calls an ornamental male.

We are a special lazy breed indeed. No useful hobbies here thank you. No woodworking or sanding or landscaping. Just lounging about watching films, particular the mindless action ones and then having long pointless discussions with mates about them.

One of my favourite franchises in this genre is The Fast and Furious, particularly the movies featuring the late Paul Walker, who from the accounts I’ve read was an all round nice guy and gear head who knew his cars, especially the Japanese Domestic Market vehicles or JDMs as they are known.

Maybe I’m going a bit stir crazy myself or maybe the lockdown has just helped to really focus my mind for the first time, but this past weekend when I did a marathon Fast & Furious session (the first seven of the series) I spotted a few odd things I had never noticed before.

What immediately jumped out at me was the absolutely ridiculous footwear most of the cast tend to wear. Shoes that would make racing a car — let alone even standard driving — impossible. In fact the only cast member that consistently wore sneakers that would make driving comfortable was Paul Walker.

In a scene (see above) in the first film, The Fast and The Furious, Letty Ortiz (Michelle Rodriguez), street racer, heist queen and wife of protagonist Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) arrives at the shop that he runs with his sister Mia (Jordana Brewster) dressed in ridiculously enormous Rock Boots you would expect KISS’s Gene Simmons or Motley Crue’s Nikki Sixx to wear.

Take note, she and the rest of Dominic Toretto’s crew had just been driving around in high performance sports cars. Certainly not the most sensible shoes to be wearing unless you wanted an express trip to the afterlife after slipping and sliding off the foot pedals.

Fast forward (couldn’t resist the play on words) to Fast 7 and this time Letty (see above), driving an AAR Cuda, takes on a guy in an Audi R8 wearing what appear to be a pair of delicate slip-on sandals — hardly the recommended gear for heavy-duty drag racing.  

Then there is Dominic Toretto himself, with a voice so gruff you can imagine him gargling broken glass for fun. He favours chunky boots — Timberland style — and as far as racing is concerned, probably about as useful as a lead-lined wetsuit would be for surfing.

The obscenely muscled Toretto also seems to mainly favour tank tops — even sporting a white one on his wedding day to Letty in a flashback. Whether he is in action in Mexico or on a jaunt in freezing London, he’s wearing a vest. The psychological pressure on millennials to get jacked up in the gym like Toretto must be immense. Gen Xers had it easy because all our heroes, like Chuck Norris or Jean Claude van Damme, merely stayed trim and athletic. And, damnit, even Chuck Norris wore a jacket or coat from time to time.

And of course leaving the best for last — enter Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as super cop Luke Hobbs in Fast Five, 6 and 7 wearing what appears to be neoprene shrink-wrapped to his body and the heaviest combat boots on the planet.

He is so ripped he makes Vin Diesel look like a gangly nerd. In one preposterous scene in Fast 7, Johnson, sulking in a hospital bed with a broken arm, collar bone and leg (two places), decides to join the action unfolding in the streets outside. No problem! He flexes his arm, shatters the plaster, dry swallows some pain tabs, before launching an ambulance off a bridge and into a flying drone (see above).

Yes, yes I hear you say — what is the point of all of this. What have we learnt?

Precious little I’m afraid. Wouldn’t I be better served learning something useful — maybe some skill that could actually stand me in good stead. Maybe I could even learn the basics about wood working or sanding or how to reshape that garden into a slice of Eden.

But then I would have to get off the couch and I’ve just gotten comfortable.

• Nick Wilson usually writes about more sober matters for Business Times. He drives a Subaru BRZ and one day hopes to be brave enough to turn the traction control off.