'The Fate Of The Furious' Runs On Diesel Fumes
Has any movie franchise ever swole up more unrecognizably than The Fast & the Furi-ad? Its opening heat, back in 2001, was just a humble Point Break knockoff. Fourteen years later, Furious 7 overcame the death of its second banana, Paul Walker, during production to gross a billion-and-a-half dollars. By then, the series had reinvented itself as an globetrotting heist/spy/wrestling franchise, one as reliant on digital animation and unbound by verisimilitude as any superhero epic. Why just rip off Point Break when you can rip off ... everything?
Vin Diesel sat out a couple of sequels before returning as producer, star, and self-described "" with the 2009 model, . (His vision for the saga did not, when Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson came aboard as a Federal agent shrinkwrapped in GSA-issue Under Armour. If the affable, versatile Johnson wasn't a bigger draw than the surly, one-note Diesel back then, he certainly is now. The frame is no longer big enough for the both of them: When Johnson threw an Instagram fit while shooting the new last summer, it smelled like Universal's (totally ripped) publicity arm was cooking up a Diesel v. Johnson rivalry to sell the movie.
