I recently watched the 5th Fast and Furious film at the cinema, with my husband Phil. Both of us have been long term fans of the films, and I wanted to try and sum up why I liked them and what I liked about them. Over the next little while I’ll review all five of the films I’ve seen.
For my husband it’s easy, he likes cars and he likes it when there is action and things blow up. And although I like cars too, it’s not entirely enough to make me like the films as much as I do.
Warning: There are spoilers
In the first film we follow Brian (Paul Walker) an undercover cop as he tries to figure out who is hijacking the local trucks and stealing their loads. This leads him to Dom (Vin Diesel) and his crew, Letty, Mia, Vince and Jesse. The film mostly consists of a few car races, a hijacking scene in which Vince gets shot, though survives, and some more shooting and cars blowing up at the end. It also has a fairly well acted romance between Brian and Mia. Brian ends up respecting Dom so much that he lets him go at the end rather than arresting him.
Even though Dom is the ‘bad guy’ in this film, there is something about him I like. He has a cute habit of making his family and anyone with them say grace before eating and he really obviously cares for his family and sister.
Brian is mostly just trying to do his job at first and then really enjoys being accepted into the famly unit Dom has got going. It’s fairly obvious from the beginning that most of the other cops do not like Brian that much and I think he is very touched by the family atmosphere Dom goes to every effort to create.
It goes to show that sometimes a sense of belonging somewhere is more valuable than the morals we originally hold to. That loving each other and forgiving people’s faults is sometimes more important than them being punished for doing the wrong thing.
The film makes me think a little of a quote from the Bible where it says ‘people will know that I am God because of your love for one another’ and yes that is paraphrased because I couldn’t for the life of me find the actual bible verse and, unlike normal, biblegateway couldn’t help me find it either. It made me look at my own church friends and realise how blessed I was that I could consider them family just as Dom could his friends.