The Fast and the Furious

Rob Cohen’s film is really an undercover assignment story. The races do not advance the plot, they introduce people; the actual crime is a run of truck hijackings, and the two strands never fully merge. The tension comes not from the chases but from the question of which side Brian will end up on, and the film manages to keep that open until the final scene. The source is a magazine piece. Racer X, by Kenneth Li, published in Vibe in May 1998, described illegal street racing in New York and a driver named Rafael Estevez. The studio bought the rights, moved the action to Los Angeles and added the hijacking plot, so the Californian scene on screen was a transplant. Casting was not straightforward. The studio said it would approve the picture if Timothy Olyphant took the part of Dominic; he turned it down, thinking it would be stupid and that nobody would watch such a film over and over. Neither Jordana Brewster nor Michelle Rodriguez held a licence, and Brewster had to pass a driving test so she could be insured, then was flown straight to a driving school in Las Vegas. Right for someone reading the races as a shop window onto a subculture. Wrong for a viewer who needs the driving to obey physics.