Fast and Furious 9: Score as low as 5.6 points! Watching too many uninspired drag racing makes people feel tired.
With a box office of 380 million on the first day and a cumulative box office of 875 million in three days, “Fast and Furious 9” undoubtedly became the best-performing Hollywood blockbuster in mainland China after the Spring Festival. Even due to its unstoppable filming momentum, it created a record for the premiere day of Chinese film history.
Simply put, all theaters seem to be sure that “Fast and Furious 9” will recreate the box office myth.
However, in stark contrast to its commercial performance, as soon as Douban opened on May 21, the film was staggering with an ultra-low reputation of 6.1 points. In the next few days, the rating dropped to 5.6, becoming the lowest rating ever in the “Fast and Furious” series.
“Fast and Furious 9″‘s super strong ability to attract gold on the premiere day, and the overall defeat of word of mouth, seem to be completely contradictory, but for fans who know this series a little, it is easy to understand.
After all, the audience is reluctant to give up this summer, Hollywood’s most important visual effects blockbuster, but they don’t care whether Newton’s coffin board can be suppressed, and they can’t give a decent rating.
Even some audiences sing badly, how far can such “Fast and Furious” go?
The story of this film takes place a few years after “Fast and Furious 8”. This can be seen from the fact that Brian grew up from a baby to a boy who can roughly distinguish the model of the wrench.
Dom had planned to live in seclusion from now on, and would no longer ask questions about the rivers and lakes, and live a paradise life with Letty and his son, Brian Jr.. But Roman, Taiji, and Ramsey suddenly arrived, and informed Dom that the unknown agent had encountered an accident, and transmitted a piece of image data to them.
Relying on clues, Dom and others finally found the crash site in a tropical forest in Central America, and accidentally discovered a terrorist weapon that could threaten the world-“Project Aries.” As long as the discovered hemisphere and the other hemisphere are merged and unlocked with the secret key, the global satellite can be controlled through it, and the defense system of all countries can be breached.
And the agent who betrayed Mr. Anonymous, took Sever (the villain hacker played by Richards Theron in the eighth), and used Dom and others to find weapons is his brother Jacob.
The main story of the film is still the opposition between good and evil. Dom’s team seeks allies around the world, collects clues, and prepares the chariot; while Jacob works with the son of a European politician to control the world.
In order to evoke the audience’s memories of the first few films of “Fast and Furious”, Sean, the protagonist in “Fast and Furious 3”, appears as a car mechanic; Mia, who has enjoyed family happiness with Brian, is also reinstalled. ; Even the Mexican brothers, Rio and Santos, who have not seen for a long time, are eye-catching in Dom’s flashback clips.
Of course, the heaviest returnee this time is Han who died in a car accident in “Fast and Furious 3.” He took the key to the “Aries Project” and rejoined the Dom team.
Obviously, the reason why Universal Studios allows these old friends to reappear is the same as the role of “stinger” in Marvel movies. For the diehard fans of the “Fast and Furious” series, this may unlock more fun than passersby.
However, this kind of sentimental play has become a nightmare for ordinary audiences. They don’t have so much time to review the first few parts of the series, looking for the story connection and character relationship between each part.
More importantly, this strategy disrupted the originally solid emotional line-the past grievances between Dom and his brother Jacob.
Jacob, who has lived in the shadow of his brother since he was a child, has extremely complicated emotions for Dom. On the one hand, he hated his elder brother’s strength in every way and was appreciated by his father; on the other hand, he regarded his elder brother as an idol, and unscrupulously wanted to surpass him.
It can be said that the film is quite successful in the expression of the former emotion. Whether it was a misunderstanding caused by his father’s car accident that caused Dom to regard him as a murderer, or driving him into exile in a racing car, Jacob lost all his affection. All of these make Jacob’s behavior of renunciation and seeking to be hegemonic tenable.
However, in the latter kind of emotion, the film has almost no ink. Furthermore, we can see how deep Jacob’s hatred of Dom is, but we can’t see how strong the affection between the two is. And this is the ultimate reason for the climax of the film to pull the hips.
When Jacob’s accomplice Otto betrayed him and planned to kill him, Jacob’s subsequent series of actions were deeply confusing. In the absence of any reconciliation, the two brothers actually staged a drama of brother cooperation, and together they turned Otto’s armored vehicle upside down.
At this time, the dramatic conflicts established before the film are immediately useless, because if the reconciliation between the characters appears to be trivial and easy, then the hatred between the characters appears pretentious and pretentious.
So, when we watched the film, we suddenly discovered that maybe “Fast and Furious 9” is just a movie about “My brother doesn’t love me but loves others, I have to make a terrible death to attract his attention”.
In addition to the collapse of the character’s direction and the breaking of emotional clues, the action scenes that “Fast and Furious 9” is proud of are also difficult to escape and impressive.
To put it simply, the main show of the film is basically three.
- It is an adventure in Central America. A large number of vehicles drove the mines in the wild; when he reached the cliff, Roman drove up from the broken bridge miraculously; even the steel cables could be used by Dom to swing.
- It was Dom and others who tried to prevent Jacob from stealing the second hemisphere of the “Aries Plan”. This led to Ramsey driving a magnetic car to sweep the street, and the melee scenes of the two brothers.
- It is a decisive battle between good and evil in the climax part. There are land battles between Dom and Letty and Jacob, using electromagnetic forces as weapons to subdue the villains, and there are also Taiji and Roman rushing into space and hitting satellites.
However, no matter which scene, there is a huge problem, that is, we can’t feel any “pain” or frustration, and this is actually the key to the quality of Hollywood action movies.
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For example, the well-known Matt Damon played “The Bourne” series, the protagonist in the film Bourne in the process of desperation, although showing superb boxing skills, and capable as an agent. However, it is worth noting that he is always injured, and the surface of his skin is often covered with scars and blood. At the same time, Byrne is constantly encountering treacherous formations and insidious pursuits by spy agencies.
However, in “Fast and Furious 9”, Dom drove over the cliff with a steel cable, as if he was just inspired. After he landed safely, he didn’t change his face and heartbeat, and he didn’t even scratch his body.
This is the scene where Roman murmured with Taiji and Ramsey in the film. Perhaps even the screenwriter really has lingering fears, and feels that there is no need to ridicule the way to explain Roman tore 14 regular Mexican soldiers, but they are unharmed, which is really impossible to explain to the audience.
But it is precisely this that gives us a glimpse of the fact that the “Fast and Furious” series has not only taken Newton seriously, and even the design of the action scenes has only embraced a pure game attitude. It doesn’t matter whether the action scene is high or not, it is the kingly way to make the audience scream.
This ostensibly set up with high-energy terrorist activities and a super-luxury scene wrapped in a flawed work can not help but remind people of the initial dream of the “Fast and Furious” series, and how this dream grew step by step, and finally became a bubble. process.
In 1998, the American hip-hop music magazine “Induction” published an article “Street Chariot”, which recorded a phenomenon on the streets of the United States at that time: many trendy young people bought cheap Japanese Honda cars and modified them. Race on the streets of New York.
Since then, this phenomenon has been reported by many media one after another, resulting in a subcultural movement, which, together with hip-hop music, street graffiti, skateboarding, etc. at the time, became a leisure project for fashionable young people.
Universal Studios sensed a business opportunity and planned to shoot a police action film based on street racing. This is the first part of “Fast and Furious” in 2001, and it is where the dream begins.
At that time, whether it was Van Diesel, who played Dom, or Paul Walker, who played No. 2 Brian, he had only played some supporting roles and low-cost films, without dazzling starlight.
However, this film with an investment of only 38 million U.S. dollars earned 207 million U.S. dollars at the global box office. Global confidence has greatly increased and it is planned to step up preparations for the second film.
But Van Diesel decisively refused, on the grounds that the second script was too bad. As a result, the world can only find Tyrese Gibson as Roman, form a new partner with Brian, and continue to tell the story of racing and crime.
However, the word-of-mouth of the second part has declined. Although the investment has doubled, it is just a breakeven in terms of box office returns.
However, Universal did not intend to end this hastily, but increased the investment to 85 million U.S. dollars to shoot the third part. But because this time even Paul Walker disliked the script for being too bad and gave up acting, so Universal had to change its strategy and rewrite the script, opening a brand new chapter “Tokyo Drift” and handing the guide tube to the Chinese director Lin Yibin.
However, the brand-new story and the cool drift only made word-of-mouth rebound slightly, but it failed at the box office, falling from 230 million U.S. dollars in the previous film to 158 million U.S. dollars this time. Do you want to continue filming the “Fast and Furious” series? Universal hesitated for the first time.
Fortunately, in the years after 2006, Van Diesel’s films were not satisfactory in word of mouth and box office. The old club Universal aimed at the opportunity to find him, and tentatively asked him if he plans to continue filming the “Quick Excitement” series.
Van Diesel thought about it again and again, and after agreeing, he also proposed to be the producer of the fourth part. With the same budget as the third film, the box office of the film reached 360 million U.S. dollars, and the reputation is equally gratifying. The current Douban score is 7.8, which is also the upper-middle level of the entire series.
It can be said that the reopening of the fourth part has rescued the “Fast and Furious” series. Since then, the fifth installment of US$620 million and the sixth installment of US$780 million have made “Fast and Furious” one of the best-selling series in Hollywood.
Especially the seventh part, which is confusing. Because Paul Walker died during the filming process, the blessing of the lacrimal gland and the three bald heads (Van Diesel, Dashi Johnson, and Jason Statham) went into battle. Next, the film won 1.51 billion U.S. dollars, becoming the best-selling film in the entire series so far.
Naturally, it is not difficult to understand that the eighth film has won a good box office with its strong star lineup and high budget.
Looking back at the entire “Fast and Furious” series, in fact, it has generally gone through three stages.
- The first stage is from the first to the third, with street racing theme as the main content of the film. So when we look back at the first three films, there will be a sense of being on the wrong set in a trance. Nitrogen acceleration, engine model, and low-cost special effects show the picture of the car driving at high speed, reminiscent of the game “Need For Speed”.
- The second stage is from the fourth to the seventh, racing scenes rarely or no longer appear, the plot of the car chase explosion is the top priority. The subject matter has also changed from ordinary street gangster competitions to transnational criminal drug lords and terrorists.
- The third stage is after the eighth. Although the story is no different from the theme of “Mission: Impossible”, it is about global terrorists, but whether it is the eighth or the ninth, the scene is It has already broken away from the imagination of the “car” itself in the second stage, but made a fuss on the media such as airplanes, artillery, tanks, and the Internet.
It can be said that the “Fast and Furious” series has experienced the early days of “getting rich overnight”, depression, and the vigorous and excellent quality after the restart. But now, it is like a kidnapped visionary. Fly higher and higher in the sky, and cannot travel farther and farther on the ground.
As a result, it feels that the air is thin; as a result, it becomes a shriveled work without “popularity”.
“Fast and Furious9” is a typical representative of this sense of subsequent powerlessness. In addition to raising the audience’s imagination for the big scene, it does nothing.
Perhaps when the “Fast and Furious” series really comes to an end, Universal will reflect on the root cause of the failure of this huge IP!
