How 'Hobbs And Shaw' Completes The 'Fast And Furious' Franchise's Long Road To Science Fiction

Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw is now in theaters and it is a bonkers action movie that brings the street racing franchise into soft sci-fi territory and a step closer to their inevitable movie set in space. Who would have thought back in the early 2000s that a franchise that started with petty criminals and street racing would one day introduce superhuman cybernetics and a programmable virus? With the franchise's first spin-off (unless you count Tokyo Drift) feeling like such a departure from the early years of the Fast & Furious movies, let's take a scroll down memory lane to see how we got here.

Remember when the Fast & Furious franchise was little more than a rip-off of the 1991 bro-tastic Point Brake, only with muscle cars instead of surfboards? Neither does anyone working in the Fast & Furious franchise, apparently. Anyway, this one follows LAPD cop Brian O'Conner (Paul Walker) who goes undercover in the world of illegal street racing to find the mastermind behind the very serious highspeed heists of several DVD players off moving 18-wheelers. During the course of the investigation, Brian begins to fall for street racer Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and his sister Mia (Jordana Brewster).It is a bromance for the ages, and the movie introduces several key players to the franchise including Dom's girlfriend Letty Ortiz (Michelle Rodriguez) and lays the groundwork for Dom and Brian's incredible driving skills and ability to pull off heists on fast cars which is the heart and soul of the Fast & Furious franchise.

Arguably the absolute best title for a movie in this franchise, but also arguably least important movie in the franchise in terms of it moving the story and tone along to bring us closer to cars in space. After all, Vin Diesel doesn't even show up! Instead we have Tyrese Gibson and Ludacris as Roman and Tej, respectively, who have bigger roles in later movies. This movie does have a scene in which Brian and Roman drive a car off a ramp and land on a moving yacht in what Roman describes as "some real Dukes of Hazzard s***." It's outlandish, impossible, and very cool-looking, but it also shows that the franchise is eager to go bigger, bolder, and into the realm of superheroes, where the laws of physics no longer apply.

The absolute best movie in the franchise, Tokyo Drift doesn't do much in terms of bringing the film closer to the superhero genre, nor does it have stunts as elaborate as in latter films, but it introduces the concept of drifting into the franchise and helped popularize the culture in the West. Most importantly it gave us the best character in any Furious movie: Han (Sung Kang), whose full name is Han Seoul-Oh (really).When it comes to moments that make you forget about the laws of nature or physics, Tokyo Drift is pretty grounded, with the exception of the race through the streets of Tokyo, which includes driving right through a very much crowded intersection in Shibuya, where the cars never even slow down but the crowds are able to quickly react and make space for two cars to go through (and everyone goes on about their business). This is the movie that first expanded the world of the Fast & Furious franchise and opened it to a globetrotting audience.

After 2 Fast 2 Furious and Tokyo Drift showed audiences don't need to have the entire team together in one movie, or even be set in the US, Fast & Furious takes us back in time after the Tokyo detour and finally puts together the team we now know and love, and also sends us on our first international mission. Tej, Roman, Dom, Mia, Brian, Letty and Han are all back (the last one being very much still alive), and we are introduced to Gisele (Gal Gadot). This is the odd film that is in-between the trilogies of the franchise. The first one, 2 Fast, and Tokyo Drift make for a relatively concise trilogy about street racing, gangs, and bromance. Then Fast Five, Fast & Furious 6, and Furious 7 constitute the big international and high-stakes espionage saga with physics-breaking stunts that also follows Brian and Mia starting a life together and leaving crime behind. Then there's the so-called "last" trilogy that started with Fate of the Furious and ends with the tenth and final movie. While Fast & Furious doesn't have the big globetrotting mission, it still has our characters going from the Dominican Republic to Panama City, to Mexico, and of course, Los Angeles. Its stunts pale in comparison to the next four movies, but this one still paves the way for the elaborate craziness thanks to an off-the-wall opening scene where Letty hangs from a fuel tanker as Dom and the gang steal it, until something goes wrong and Letty has to jump to Dom's car, then drive away under the spiralling body of the exploding tanker at the right exact second or fall down a cliff. It's the promise for over-the-top, completely bonkers, and absolutely thrilling excitement that the later movies will deliver with ease.

Can you smell what Hobbs is cooking? Get ready for the movie that took everything we knew about the franchise and cranked it up to 11. By now we know Dom and his team are able to take down a drug cartel, so why not go full crime thriller and have them rob a powerful Brazilian crime boss and steal $100 million by dragging a bank vault through the streets of Rio de Janeiro? Where Fast & Furious built the foundations of the team using their cars for something other than racing, Fast Five asks "why did we show racing at all?" as Vin Diesel's Dom now has a crew big enough to fill in a professional sports team, and gives the film has as many heists as Heat. Caution and physics are out the window and absurdity is now the special of the day. Honestly, the franchise is way better off this way.After the previous movie ended with Dom being sent to prison and Brian and Mia on their way to rescue him, Fast Five starts with them moving to Brazil to steal cars for a living. After a bonkers train heist sequence involving sports cars running in the desert better than any 4x4 and Dom and Brian being able to drive a burning car off a cliff and somehow survive the fall, the team discovers that one of the stolen cars has a chip with drug delivery schedules and the location of $100 million belonging to the aforementioned crime lord. What are they to do but steal it with the help of Roman, Gisele, Han (still alive and kicking), and Tej, who somehow went from owning a car repair shop into becoming a tech genius and expert hacker. This movie also introduces half of Hobbs & Shaw as Luke Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson), an agent for the Diplomatic Security Service, and local Brazilian officer Elena Neves (Elsa Pataky) are tasked to bring Dom and his team to justice.The stunts and fight scenes in Fast Five make all previous Fast & Furious movies look like they were made by children. Dom is not only bigger and stronger now, but goes toe-to-toe with Hobbs as they throw each other through several concrete walls without so much as a scratch. This is the movie that takes our little team of DVD-stealing drivers and turns them into criminal masterminds capable of hacking into the strongest security systems on Earth, and also do any feat of strength or skill as long as they're driving cars. Did I mention they drag a bank vault through the streets like it was covered in butter? Making it bounce and roll like a ball? They do.

Admittedly, the least imaginative title in the franchise, but the darkest film in the franchise. They kill both Han and Gisele? Come on!By now we have already established that Dom and his crew can pull off jobs bigger than the Impossible Missions Force, being able to hack, punch, shoot, and most importantly, drive their way in and out of any situation. Still, they had been thieves and criminals, working against drug lords, criminals, and crime lords. This time, they are the only team that the feds trust to find an international group of international criminals/terrorist that are building a weapon that can disable power in an entire region. See? Crime does pay, as long as you do it as a family. Why are street racers the best people for this job? Who knows! But they are now a legit task force with all the might and power of the US government behind them. You thought dragging a safe through the streets was impossible? How about jumping across a motorway and catching someone mid-air before landing on a car and suffering no injuries? How about a goddamn tank driving though said motorway destroying infrastructure and dozens of cars? What about a chase at an airport in what seems like the longest runway in the galaxy, wherein the team's cars are chained to a huge airplane preventing it from taking off? Now this is podracing.This is the movie that finally introduces Bond-style supervillains into the franchise, with Luke Evan's Owen Shaw making the confrontations in the franchise personal for no reason. It also brings Letty back from the dead using soap operas' favorite method: amnesia! 

This is the movie that changed everything. Not only did Furious 7 show James Wan could handle big-budget action blockbusters as well as he does horror films, but it was the first film in the franchise to cross $1 billion at the global box office, all despite (or because of) the untimely death of one of the film's stars, Paul Walker. When it comes to the movie itself, this is the payoff for the groundwork laid out by every movie in the franchise before this one. Because Dom and the crew put Owen Shaw in a coma in the previous movie, his big brother Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham, the second half of Hobbs & Shaw) is now out for revenge. His first target is Hobbs, who he fights by (again) throwing through several walls without any of them really beating the other, all to get information on Dom's team. Unfortunately, Shaw then kills dear old Han by his car into Han's during a race and dies in the resulting explosion. Now Dom is approached by Mr. Nobody (Kurt Russell) and starts working for a covert-ops team to track down the creator of a piece of software called God's Eye so he can find Shaw. See? Who needs DVDs when you can be a real James Bond complete with your own M. Now the tech genius Ramsey (Nathalie Emmanuel) is part of the team/family and Brian leaves the team to raise his family.In terms of the plot, this one does the most work to advance the transition from street racing to international spies, mostly due to the introduction of Ramsey and Mr. Nobody. As for the stunts, this movie makes everything seems bigger and more dangerous, including the action. There are so many ridiculous and over-the-top stunts it's impossible to pinpoint the one that jumps the shark the most, but probably it has to be the skydiving cars. You see, in order to rescue Ramsey and hijack her captors' convoy, Dom's whole crew has to drive their cars out of a plane and parachute down to the middle of the road, all without a single scratch on them or the cars. Of course, this is a Fast & Furious movie, so there are even more crazy stunts like Brian running up the side of a bus as it falls down a cliff, or a car that drives out of a skyscraper into another skyscraper, then out of that skyscraper and into another one. This movie is cuckoo bananas and you gotta respect how serious and earnest it keeps the tone.

After eight movies, the franchise finally reached the point where it has to have a fake betrayal. The Fate of the Furious ties the last two movies together by adding a villain named Cipher (Charlize Theron) who was the one that hired Owen Shaw to steal the Nightshade device and was after God's Eye. She also kidnapped Elena from Fast Five, who is now the mother of Dom's child, and is threatening to kill both unless Dom fakes betraying his team in order to give Cipher access to nukes. See? It only took eight movies to reach the good, old nuclear McGuffin! Where the last couple of movies have had grand villains with big plans, this is the first time the franchise has dealt with apocalypse-levels of high stakes, paving the way for Hobbs & Shaw and its programmable virus. This movie also gave us the Hobbs/Shaw team-up that led to the franchise's first spin-off, though at the expense of every fan wanting justice for Han's death.If you want stunts, look no further than the crazy scene where Cipher hacks into all of the cars in New York City and make them rain down on the street by forcing them to drive out the parking garages' window. Then there's Hobbs literally throwing a torpedo with his bare hands while racing a submarine in a frozen lake in Russia while enemy cars are shooting missiles at Dom and the crew. 

And we're here. The end of the road. Eight movies deep and the Fast & Furious franchise is almost unrecognizable, except it was always interested in going big and ridiculous. We may not be stealing DVD players anymore, but the heart of the franchise is still there. Of course, the outer shell of the Furious movies is gone, and instead of chasing money or drugs, the McGuffin of this movie is a programmable virus capable of melting everyone's insides like soup. Instead of chasing down drug dealers or DVD thieves, the villain in the latest movie is a supersoldier that's also a borderline cyborg, played by Idris Elba. That being said, I'm not sure you need cybernetic enhancements if you're The Rock and you can wrangle a helicopter into submission like you're Captain America. These movies have always been a bit ridiculous, impossible, and 100% against the laws of nature, but there's no denying that each movie has laid down the groundwork for the next one to be even crazier and ridiculous. As everyone does whenever there's a new Furious movie coming out, we have to ask ourselves: how long until they go to space? It's the only logical step forward!