The 2 Best Fast & Furious Movies, According to Nolan
The Fast & Furious franchise is rarely praised by film critics, particularly by those who consider themselves to be true cinephiles with refined tastes. It is usually characterized as "brainless action movies", same as, say, Michael Bay's Transformers series.
But as it happens, even famous film directors, whose films are radically different in tone, may enjoy Fast & Furious. For example, Christopher Nolan admitted his appreciation of the franchise.
Sure, Nolan also makes action blockbusters, but his films are quite cerebral for the genre, as Tenet (2020), with its use of such a complex concept as time inversion as a plot device, most recently evidenced. But as Nolan revealed on the Happy, Sad, Confused podcast, the rumors that he actually loves Fast & Furious are true.
In particular, although he prefers Rob Cohen's franchise-starting movie, he also feels that The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift is a great installment:
"I'm sort of an original recipe [guy], I mean the Rob Cohen original ... But I've got a very soft spot for Tokyo Drift actually. And then the skill as Justin Lin's iterations, as they got crazier and bigger and crazier and bigger, they became something else, but something else kind of fun."
As the scale of Fast & Furious franchise grows, watching them becomes more and more exciting.
As Nolan explained, "The fun thing about those movies is even as they've gotten bigger and bigger and bigger, as sequels have to do, everyone always complains that sequels get bigger but we're the people making sequels get bigger, we do want them bigger, you don't want them smaller…"
While this might be surprising on the first glance, it stands to reason that a great filmmaker can appreciate approaches of others, even if he does not share those approaches (although given how confusing Tenet was in places, borrowing some directness and simplicity from Fast & Furious might do him some good), as well as imagination and technical skills necessary to film Fast & Furious' action sequences, which earned the franchise its fame.
We hope that Nolan is going to like Fast X (scheduled for release May 19, 2023) as much as the rest of the franchise's audience and that the new installment would be able to reinvigorate Fast & Furious after F9's relatively unimpressive performance.