Still the best of the bunch!

Rating: 9/10 (31 July 2015)

So I finally got around to seeing the 7th movie in the immensely successful Fast & Furious franchise. I am a big fan of the entire franchise, and even though the latest part (Furious 7) currently gets the highest ratings out of all, the 1st is still my favorite. It has a certain charm that all the sequels lack. As a movie on it's own, much has been said before: The story is rather shallow, it has plot holes-a-plenty and the dialogue makes you cringe, but if you like fast cars and action, you'll most likely enjoy this movie. Nothing new there. But I would like to point out why for me the original The Fast & The Furious is still the highlight of the franchise.
First of all, next to being a movie buff, I'm also very much a car guy, and from that point of view I can appreciate The Fast & The Furious' efforts to try and portray genuine car culture. An aspect that for me has really been missing from the later additions in the franchise. Admittedly for the car-tuning community this movie probably did more bad than good, and car enthusiasts love to rip on all the technical mistakes in this movie, but compared to the later F&F movies, this one actually does quite alright. For example, when Dom (Vin Diesel) shifts his car (a Mazda RX7) into gear at the start of the first race we get to see an elaborate CGI sequence that takes us through the entire drive train of the car. It's a fancy gimmick at first, but re-watching this sequence some time ago I noticed that the engine of the car didn't have pistons. Instead it has rotors. The filmmakers actually took the time to research the fact that RX7's are powered by rotary engines rather than your standard piston engine. We don't see this kind of attention to detail in the later movies and for all it's technical mistakes the 1st Fast & Furious also gets it right in many places.
But even apart from these technicalities, The Fast & The Furious has got more redeeming qualities. I find that the original Fast & Furious has the most believable characters compared to the other installments in the franchise. Here we have a group of high-school drop-outs, who grew up together doing their car-thing. They're clearly a close-knit group of friends (a family) kept together by Vin Diesel's leader/father figure. In this context Diesel's character and the entire "I got family" thing makes sense. This isn't so much the case in the later movies (especially 5, 6 and 7), where Dominic becomes this stuck-in-the-past guy going on and on about his so called "family" who are actually just a group of loosely associated characters that come together on occasion and then go their separate ways again. Don't get me wrong, the all-star ensemble is fun in the action-blockbuster franchise F&F has become now, but below the surface the original still provides most of the drive behind the characters 6 movies later.
In a similar way The Fast & The Furious has the best "bad guys" from the series as well. I always found Johnny Tran and his gang much more intriguing than any of the other bad boys in the sequels. In every other F&F film the crew rises up against some mafia figure (Verone, Braga, Reyes, etc.) who is evil for the sake of being evil, and who's ultimate downfall is always underestimating this crew of street racers because, you know, they're just street racers, right? It gets rather formulaic. Johnny Tran on the other hand isn't this ultimate bad guy. In fact his actions are rather well motivated. He's not even looking for trouble, like he says: "You stay away, I stay away. Everybody stays happy". But then this Torreto guy shows up in his turf again, some guy steals his engines, his whole family gets raided by the police, and to top it off he wins a pink slip fair and square, but the guy drives off. So he's righteously angry and retaliates. Johnny Tran has a reason to be the bad guy, unlike those in later installments.
Further more the dialogue is actually one thing that I like about this movie. For better or worse, this movie has become one of the most quoted movies among my friends and family. Like many have pointed out before, the dialogue (especially the tech-talk) isn't the best written, but unintentionally this also adds to the believability of the characters. Go to any car meeting and you're bound to hear guys talking like they know all about cars and engines, while in fact they don't. Just like Dom's infamous victory speech. A lot about this movie is all show and no go, but that's also very much the "tuning" scene it tries to portray, in such a way that by now this movie often feels like a time-document, an homage almost, to the ridiculous car-mod culture in those days.
Lastly I think The Fast & The Furious deserves a an extra credit for the original score by Brian Transeau (BT). He perfectly captures the atmosphere of the film with his scoring, particularly taking influence from his groundbreaking debut album "Ima". The later films lack this quality especially whenever "Ludacris" is involved and the entire soundtrack is full of cheesy pop-rap/club music that really doesn't fit the style of the movies at all.
So there you have it, 8/10 for the original Fast & Furious film. Well deserved and still the best of the bunch!