Brow Beat

The Fate of the Furious Trailer Is a Stroke of Stupid Genius

The Fast and Furious movies’ willingness to embrace their own absurdity in a big, sleeveless hug is a big part of their enduring charm, and the series has leaned into that steroidal silliness even more as it’s burned through whatever tenuous connection to reality it once had.

The eighth movie in the series, The Fate of the Furious, looks to be its silliest, and therefore greatest, yet, from the creaky pun in its title forward. And the new trailer for the movie offers further confirmation for that thesis. We already knew from the earlier trailers that the movie, conceived after the death of Paul Walker, would feature Vin Diesel’s Dom Toretto turning against his “family” at the behest of Charlize Theron, that it would somehow involve getting Jason Statham’s erstwhile bad guy to fight, at least temporarily, on the side of good, and that it would end up with the crew driving a tank on the arctic ice while being chased by a submarine. But what that trailer neglected to tell us is that the plot also involves Theron’s Cipher, “the very definition of high-tech terrorism,” using a computer hack to take over all the cars in Manhattan and send them careening around the streets like life-size Matchbox cars in the hands of a hyperactive 5-year-old.

In retrospect, that seems like a pretty big omission: Dom’s crew has raced all manner of vehicles, but removing humans from the equation entirely feels like some sort of conceptual leap. Now we can watch luxury sedans shooting out the windows of midtown buildings and crashing to the street in a ball of flame without even pretending to worry about what happened to the person in the driver’s seat. If you can get through that portion of the trailer without a big, dumb grin spreading across your face—well, maybe you need to keep watching until it gets to the arctic sequence, where we now see Dwayne Johnson grabbing a torpedo with his bare hands and using it to blow up the bad guys’ cars.* It approaches a kind of stupid genius, which is exactly what people go to the Fast and Furious movies for.

*Correction, March 9: The post originally misspelled Dwayne Johnson’s name.