“I don’t have friends, I got family,” Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) proudly intones in Furious 7. And, up to that point, he was right. As the cast and crew of those movies will tell anyone who asks (and even some people who don’t), Family with a capital “F” is the chief thematic concern of the Fast & Furious franchise. And through the seventh installment, for the most part, Dom’s family was not dictated by blood but rather by friendship. Sure, his sister Mia (Jordana Brewster) has always been around, but otherwise those were not blood relatives sitting around the table saying grace at the end of every installment. They were the people who have been through the shit with Dom, the people who were willing to jump a car out of the back of an airplane for him, the people he could trust with his life. Somewhere along the line, though, that thread has been lost, with actual literal family members becoming the series’ primary method for driving home the “family” mission statement. It has not been a change for the better.
“Found families” are a time-honored component of a number of great movies and TV series over the years. On the small screen, just think of the folks who came together on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its sister show Angel, or even on sitcoms like Parks and Recreation and New Girl, to forge a bond tighter than most nuclear families. On the big screen, you can watch “found families” thrive in everything from Guardians of the Galaxy to Boogie Nights. Yeah, it’s a bit of a trope, but it’s a good one. Especially since found families can work in any genre, allow for an endless number of permutations, and also birth romantic relationships inside the families themselves. The Fast & Furious films had themselves a strong cinematic family, with Dom, Brian, Letty, Mia, Tej, Roman, Han, Gisele and more all easily meeting the criteria for a found family that the audience itself felt included in, too.
And then things started to change. It probably began with the death of Paul Walker, as the everlasting bromance between Dom and Walker’s Brian O’Conner provided the bedrock of Fast’s found family dynamic. There have been other strong anchors, including Dom’s romantic relationship with Letty (Michelle Rodriguez), but losing the Dom/Brian dynamic was a massive blow. Diesel and the filmmakers clearly understood this, as they’ve kept Walker’s spirit alive in the post-Furious 7 films as much as they possibly can (in both naming Dom’s son Brian and by keeping Walker’s character alive but off-screen). Still, for the found family to thrive, the series was also going to have to strengthen the bonds between the rest of the family as they moved on without Walker.
Disappointingly, that has not happened. Thanks to behind-the-scenes friction with Diesel, Dwayne Johnson – whose character Luke Hobbs was arguably the third most significant character in the franchise following his introduction in Fast Five – walked out of the main installments for the Hobbs & Shaw spinoff movie. That film attempted to carry over the “family” theme by setting the entire climax at Hobbs’ childhood Samoan home, where untold numbers of his family lend a hand in defeating the story’s terrorist villains. Yeah, that’s family – but it’s a much different kind of family that what the series has been selling to this point.
F9: The Fast Saga doubles-down on this mistake by introducing Jakob Toretto (John Cena), Dom and Mia’s never-before-mentioned estranged brother who has become a master thief/spy/assassin. Uh, okay, sure. It’s not like the Fast series hasn’t stretched the boundaries of believability before. But it’s not the retcon itself that’s bothersome, it’s the fact that Jakob, who primarily serves as the film’s villain but switches sides near the end, pulls Dom’s attention away from everyone else in the movie outside of Letty. F9 is about family, all right – it’s about the Toretto family, which is turning positively Skywalker-ian in how heavily it weighs on the franchise. Meanwhile, Tej, Roman and everyone else are off on their own side adventures, which Dom rarely seems to acknowledge. Heck, Kurt Russell’s Mr. Nobody – who may not have been a full-on family member but was at least family-adjacent (he did show up at the barbecue in film eight) – may have died in F9, yet no one seems to care! It’s his plane crash that sets the plot in motion, but once the chase is on for the film’s McGuffin, everyone seems to totally forget to give a damn about what happened to him. It’s both bizarre and completely antithetical to the series’ family-based mission statement. Instead we get a scene with Diesel and Helen Mirren as Queenie Shaw, matriarch of the Shaw family, another group of blood relatives who have slowly come to dominate the Fast and Furious scene.
With at least two more mainline Fast films to come, there’s a chance to reverse course here and restore the “found family” at the franchise’s core. You get a glimpse of what that could look like at the end of F9 when Tokyo Drift BFF’s Sean Boswell (Lucas Black) and Han Lue (Sung Kang) come face to face many years after Han’s presumed death. It’s an incredibly moving scene, not just for Tokyo Drift fans but for anyone who buys into this series’ notion that brothers and sisters aren’t born, they’re made in battle. There’s also a nice beat in the film where Letty and Mia take a breather to just sit down and talk. It would behoove the Furious powers-that-be to fit in as many of those types of moments as possible from here on out amidst all the car chases and explosions. We’re now 10 years and four films past the cast-unifying Fast Five. Yeah, it stinks that Walker is no longer with us, but the bond between Dom and everyone else who has been around since then should be stronger than it has ever been. As the series races toward its apparent finish, let’s see those found-family bonds return to the screen rather than get inundated with new characters meant to pump up a literal definition of family that was never what this series was about.
Fast 9 Problems: Why the Definition of Family Is Changing for the Worse - Collider.com
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