The Endless Road

The Fast, the Furious, and the new laws of nature.

In 2021, sitting in a suburban New Jersey living room and chewing on a Cheeto, I witnessed a miracle. A man burned to death in a tragic car accident in Tokyo in 2006 (but also in 2014) came back to life. In fact, he had never been dead at all. 

Han Lue, played by Sung Kang, is a character in the Fast and Furious franchise, which I have a not-so-secret soft spot for. I also have a soft spot for Han, so I wasn’t too upset when the sticky fingers of retroactive continuity and poor storytelling brought him back to me.

What started as an undercover cop/car racing movie has morphed into a 10 (and soon to be 11...and maybe 12) part series where two buildings in Dubai are jumped (in a car), a safe is dragged through the streets of Rio de Janeiro (using cars), and two thoroughly unequipped men are sent into space (in a car). I love the Fast and Furious movies almost as much as the movies love cars. I love the Fast and Furious movies almost as much as the movies love barbecues. I love the Fast and Furious movies almost as much as the movies love the Fast and Furious movies. 

In Tokyo Drift, which is somehow the third and the sixth movie, but not both, Han dies in a car accident. If you’re watching Tokyo Drift as the third movie (the order in which they were made), Han’s death is a chase accident that devastates the protagonist and the audience alike. If you’re watching Tokyo Drift in universe order (in which case, the movie comes between Fast and Furious 6 and Furious 7), Han dies in a car crash caused by the villain of Furious 7. 

But if you watch F9, which in 2021 I did, Han didn’t die at all. So he comes back to life, having been alive the whole time, even after two deaths in the same movie in two different decades. 

Image: yeahmotor.com

So why bring Han back? The better question is, why not bring him back? The franchise had already brought back the presumed dead girlfriend of the protagonist, so there was precedent for resurrection. In order to bring her back, they killed the new girlfriend of the protagonist, who, as of now, is the only non-villain character to stay dead. I say as of now because in the tenth movie, Han’s girlfriend, who definitely looked like she died in the sixth movie, rolled up to Antarctica in a submarine (the car of the sea). 

To further complicate the series’ relationship with death, one of the lead actors of the first seven movies died in real life (Paul Walker passed away in 2013 after a car accident). His character is still alive in the movies. He just doesn’t come around anymore. 

Superman, But If His Kryptonite Was Running Out of Gas 

Death is somewhat of a stranger in the Fast and Furious universe, but it is no stranger to us. As of the minute that I type this, over 6.9 million people have died from COVID-19, almost 14,000 Americans have died so far in 2023 from gun violence, and by the end of this year, around 20 people will probably be killed in cow-related incidents. Death is all around us unless you’re watching the Fast and Furious movies. In which case, death is only around you if your boyfriend’s ex turns out not to be dead. 

The Fast and Furious movies play by different rules, but they always have; different rules of gravity, physics, and what cars and men are physically capable of. The rules of death were next up on the docket like they have been in better franchises (see The Ten Commandments and its subsequent Abrahamic spin-offs).

Maybe that’s the movie magic we hear so much about: Busby Berkely’s visual salads of choreography, all of The Godfather: Part II, and Vin Diesel saving the Vatican from a bomb (with a car). It’s simple to dismiss the continuous resurrections in the Fast and Furious franchise as a fan-servicing, cash-grabbing attempt at keeping the ever-expanding universe as small as possible. And it is. It is a way to inject nostalgia into stories that begin to flag under their own weight; it is a way to distract you from your reasonable questions about how many near-catastrophic evils can be eliminated with cars; it is a way to keep the action moving without needing to stop and be quiet and sit with the grief that can’t be undone with revenge or a new girlfriend or the power of family. 

The Fast and Furious movies have always been called or been accused of being powerless superhero movies. They trade in stunts and heists that real people can’t do without the cop-out of supernatural abilities; they make decisions the rest of us couldn’t, and they understand the world in a different way. They are the ultimate humans, the ultimate drivers, and they can’t be hurt unless it’s convenient. 

And in eliminating the humanity that doubles as weakness when chasing bad guys through any major city on Earth, they have eliminated death. Not necessarily for themselves; we see them grieve as much as they have time to, and we see them calculate what a life is worth before it is lost. They’ve eliminated death for us, the audience. It’s become a game of immortality whack-a-mole, figuring out who’s going to pop back out of their coffin in the next movie.

Death Comes For Us All, Vin Diesel 

Image: motorbiscuit.com

Death in the Fast and Furious movies is no longer treated with anything other than curiosity. Will this one stick, we think, as a body lies rotting on the tarmac? (It didn’t, Han’s girlfriend apparently peeled herself off the tarmac after she fell off a plane...or did she ever hit the tarmac?) 

Death is no longer the end of the road; it’s just part of the road. Of course, this is only true in the Fast and Furious universe and only if you’re one of the good guys. But to believe that no one is ever truly dead, they’re just working for a shadier equivalent of the CIA, initially seems lovely to me in an exploitative sort of way. We lose so much on a day-to-day basis, especially, it feels like, now. We are front row to horrors and gruesome acts that should be relegated to action franchises like this one. 

The violence of the Fast and Furious franchise has permeated our world. We are being treated to savagery that seems thrilling on a screen in the real-life 4-D experience. But why should we only see the reflections of cruelty? Why shouldn’t we take more from the franchise but not the guns, car crashes, or the backroom power of government agencies? Why shouldn’t we take the hope that, in some way, those who are dead are never truly gone? 

Maybe it won’t be the case in such explicit ways. My grandfather, who passed away, isn’t secretly working for the geriatric branch of the Lithuanian intelligence services (although he could drive a John Deere tractor like nobody’s business). I don’t know where he is. But no one knew where Han was, either. 

The Fast and Furious Conclusion 

Image: carsalerental.com

Han “died” in Tokyo. He went to Tokyo (if we’re abiding by the revisions made in the sixth and ninth movies) because that’s where he and his girlfriend had been planning to settle down. Then, of course, she fell off of a plane. So Han went to Tokyo alone, hoping to heal, but he got mixed up with a government agency that decided it would be easier to work with him if everyone thought he was dead. Han was dead; his girlfriend was dead, and now? No one is dead.

Maybe they’ve been together all along in the shadows. Maybe not. Maybe they’ll never get back together, but they’ll be alive. At the very least, we’ll probably get an explanation as to whether Han was on a dating app because he was pretending his girlfriend was dead or because he actually thought that she was. 

We get to see what comes next for them on the road that supposedly ended years ago. Where else do we get that? Where else do we decide that if we want to invoke someone’s name, they can come back from the dead? 

We could do that now. It’s not like some metaphysical dog whistle that causes the corpses to come shambling back. People in the Fast and Furious movies don’t die (at least the ones we don’t want to). We might not be able to go that far. But at the very least, by talking about them, we can keep them alive with us in a place where no car crash can reach them.