Having trouble deciphering the logic on this one

In another comparatively rare instance of MovieWeb providing me something useful to talk about rather than something insignificant to make fun of, I noticed this week that one of the Fast & Furious spinoffs planned is for Cipher, the villain played by Charlize Theron.

Huh?

Now don't get me wrong, if I were a Hollywood executive I would jump at any opportunity to launch a potential franchise starring Charlize Theron. But the logic of this particular one eludes me.

There's a difference between a villain who solidly fulfills the function assigned to them within the context of one or more films, and a villain iconic enough to be worth exploring in his (or her!) own movie.

I thought the Cipher character was a positive addition to The Fate of the Furious, a touch of Oscar class added to the series that we also saw with the truly surprising appearance of Helen Mirren. I greeted her return to the franchise, albeit a brief one, in F9 with muted but identifiable pleasure.

But for a moment to talk about her being worthy of a spinoff in which we get some kind of back story on her?

Ridiculous.

The only thing that makes Cipher interesting as a Big Bad is that Theron is a compelling performer. That's not enough. We have not been given a script reason to care about a villain that was only introduced into the series in its eighth installment. She's not much more than "exceptionally clever villain who can make seemingly impossible things happen." Just because Theron gives her some pizzazz does not make her rise above her core function.

I wonder if this is part of this trend of excavating the back stories of particularly female villains, something Disney has done with Maleficent and Cruella. But at least in both of those instances, the character had been with us in the culture for 50+ years. We haven't even had Cipher for five. 

Besides, do I really want to know why Cipher was "misunderstood"? I know it's this series' thing to reclaim characters who were originally introduced as villains, Jason Statham's Deckard Shaw being the prime example, but can't some characters just stay bad?

If they really want to spin off characters from this series, they should focus on Roman and Tej, the characters played by Ludacris and Tyrese Gibson. They have really good chemistry and are already kind of starring in their own buddy action comedies within this series. They could follow the Hobbes & Shaw model and just ditch the other side characters. They might have to come up with a better title that Fast & Furious Presents: Roman & Tej, but they still have quite a long time to work on that. (To be honest, this is probably something they are planning anyway. If I can think of it, obviously they can too.)

Of course, spinning off Roman and Tej does not address the likely desire to spin off a female character. And I suppose looking at it that way, a Cipher movie makes more sense. It seems true that F & F has not done a good enough job establishing a woman who would be worth spinning off. I mean, Michelle Rodriguez's Letty is cool, but no. Her value is too tied to that of Dom. The other choices are relative newcomer Nathalie Emmanuel, whose character is forgettable enough that I don't even remember when she joined the series, and Jordan Brewster's Mia Toretto, who is also a bit tied to Dom and also a bit lame. Plus, then they'd finally have to own up to the fact that the actor who plays her husband is dead. Just imagine if they'd left Gal Gadot's character alive, how much value she'd now have in a potential spinoff. But maybe she wouldn't have even gotten the Wonder Woman role if she were still committed to this series.

All those considerations notwithstanding, there's nothing that kills the head of steam of a cinematic universe more than spinoffs that fatally dilute the core product. Why do you think Star Wars has pulled back on its cinematic content? It's because they know we don't need a movie dedicated to the back story of Greedo.

And Cipher can't even carry Greedo's jock strap. 

This one goes to 11

In my review of Fast & Furious 9 (as it's called in Australia)/F9 (as it's called in the U.S.), I joked about how the inevitable Fast & Furious 10 should be called Furious X.

In reality, I didn't think that only the tenth movie was inevitable, but probably the 11th through 20th as well. If you're still making money on this franchise in today's Hollywood, where a successful franchise never dies, might as well keep making them forever. I mean, Dominic Toretto's much prized "family" already has the notion of younger generations built into it.

Strangely, I am now learning that there will be "only" two more movies in the series.

Movieweb -- which sometimes gives me extremely useless pieces of information, and sometimes actual news -- alerted me to the fact that the 10th and 11th movies are filming back to back (Lord of the Rings style), and that they will be the final two movies in the series.

"Sure," you say. "Every series says it's ending, which usually only means there will be more movies to come after the 'last' one than came before."

Ordinarily I would agree with you, but when a series has been going on this long, they end it because key participants are jack of it, to use the Australian expression. So I suppose maybe we should take an announcement that it's wrapping up more seriously than we otherwise would.

I actually didn't get beyond the headline on Movieweb, but I did some googling and found that there wasn't a reason given by Diesel, the unofficial spokesperson for the franchise, other than that "every good story deserves an ending." Probably unspoken: He doesn't want to be playing Dominic Toretto when he's 60 years old (which is only seven years off). Given that Movieweb also had Diesel talking about the filming of the next Riddick movie, maybe more to the point is that he would play Dom at 60, but even he can acknowledge that this is too ridiculous -- even more ridiculous than cars in outer space.

Eleven seems like a strange number, except that in their minds, it's the tenth movie in two parts. That's just silly. You could call this series one movie in 11 parts, if you wanted to, given how much the movies relate to each other in terms of calling back old characters and things that happened very early in the series -- even if some of that was retrofitted after the fact to give it greater continuity. Though I suppose what they'll do is end #10 on a cliffhanger, which is something this series doesn't typically do, but which will make it easier to characterize as a single film in two parts. 

Either way, it looks like they're planning to take this series to the junkyard in the sky after these final two. 

Or are they?

"It won't be the end of the Fast universe," said Diesel. "But in terms of this mythology and this saga, Fast 10 will be the finale."

So that's the way this most resembles a modern franchise. It's a brand more than a consistent set of characters. No one character has appeared in every single film, so you could also argue that no one character is the key to the success of the franchise. Dom is as close as they get, but even he didn't appear in the first sequel and was only in the end credits teaser in The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift.

They've already spun off two characters, Hobbes and Shaw, in their own movie, and I believe that movie is also getting a sequel. The next likely characters to spin off would be Roman and Tej, the characters played by Tyrese Gibson and Ludacris, whose back-and-forth has been some of the series' best (and most needed) comedy. 

And really, why not use the same characters, just with different actors? The reboot is the ultimate endgame of any long-running franchise, and over the course of 50 years into the future, there could be multiple reboots. If they want to do it relatively soon they've already cast someone as a young Dom Toretto, a Kiwi actor named Vinnie Bennett, who appears as the young Dom in F9. Whether he becomes a bankable actor or not may dictate the viability of such a move, but he's only 28, so he could do 25 years of Fast & Furious movies before he's as old as Diesel is now.

It won't be a sad sendoff for me. Although I've really enjoyed about three of these movies, that's only a third of the number that are currently in existence, or even less than that if you include Hobbes & Shaw. 

But I have seen them all, which indicates just how much this series has forced critics to reckon with it, whether they wanted to or not.

That reckoning won't come to an end in F11 -- or F10 Part II if they insist -- but at least it will hit pause.

For maybe two or three years, until they launch Fast & Furious: The New Generation, with a special cameo by Vin Diesel as Grandpa Dom. 

Establishing a pace

In my (so far) least enjoyable series of 2015, I'm checking back in with you on my progress through the Fast & Furious movies, this time with the one actually called Fast & Furious.

Way back when the latest, #7, was first released in March or April, I committed to catching up with the series by the end of the year in order to rank that movie with my 2015 movies. It was a glum proposition, though. It took me forever to finally throw on The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, and that lackluster viewing experience made me really wary about episode # 4, Fast & Furious.

Fortunately, this even more lackluster viewing experience won't daunt me to watch Fast Five, which is when I understand this series finally gets good. Or better, anyway. (I'm guessing The Rock has something to do with that.)

In fact, it's allowing me to establish a pace.

Now that I've dragged my heels so much on doing this, I know I must watch an average of one of these movies a month if I want to reach my goal. That's doable. I can watch Fast Five in October, The Fast and the Furious 6 in November and Furious 7 in December/January -- before my ranking deadline in mid-January, anyway. It's doable.

The fact that these movies start clocking in at more than two hours gives me some pause, but I'll manage.

As dull as I found Fast & Furious to be -- and I found it pretty dull -- it also has the much-anticipated function of establishing a narrative pace within this series. Now all the main character elements that are in place for the rest of the series are actually back on board, and presumably, everything that happens from here on out has a direct relationship to everything else. This could not be said of the last two movies, only the first of which had Paul Walker and only the second of which had Vin Diesel -- and only in a one-minute cameo at the end. (If he were willing to do a cameo, I wondered at the time I saw it a couple months ago, why didn't he just do the whole damn movie? Wasn't his willingness always the issue? Wasn't it that he thought these movies were beneath him?)

In fact, Tokyo Drift was so different from this series' timeline that it makes me wonder why they bothered to have any connective tissue between the third and fourth installments whatsoever. But indeed, the character of Han (Sung Kang) from Tokyo Drift shows up for the opening heist in Fast & Furious, definitely its best set piece and probably its best section overall. After he hands off the baton, they send him on his way.

What follows is a very ho-hum revenge tale set in the world of drag racing, as Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) is killed (off-screen) and it's up to Dom (Diesel) to avenge her. For the longest time, though, I had difficulty being sure that she was actually the character who died, so little emotion does Diesel show over her death. Maybe Diesel didn't want to repeat his grieving excesses in A Man Apart, but he shows little more than a scowl upon learning that she died and upon dispassionately watching her funeral from afar. Justin Lin's directing is terrible in this way throughout, as Walker's line deliveries felt particularly stilted as well. And Walker is (or was) a pretty good actor, probably better than Diesel, who isn't offering much of an effort these days.

But let's get back to Letty's death for a minute. Having been privy to the advertising campaigns for the subsequent installments of this series, I happen to know that Rodriguez appears in them, so I was expecting her death to be revealed as a hoax by the end of the movie. Nope. So now I'm wondering how this series brings her back, whether it's ultimately revealed that she faked her death, or whether they're going the soap opera route by giving her a twin sister.

For the first time in this series -- both the series of movies, and in my 2015 viewing series -- I actually look forward to finding out.

Truth in titling

The American Pie series is hardly the first series to participate in the revitalization trend of the past few years. I'm calling it a "revitalization trend" because that covers both reboots, which the latest American Pie movie is not, and delayed sequels, which the latest American Pie movie is.

However, American Reunion may have the most truthful title of any of them.

Because isn't that what these series revitalizations really are? Reunions for the cast and crew? And also for the audiences who loved these movies the first time around, and are now trying to indulge in the nostalgia that is part and parcel to the whole concept of a reunion?

That's why these reboots/delayed sequels get so many of the original participants to come back into the fold. If you are a self-respecting actor who has gone on to a successful career, it's hard to get too enthused about the umpteenth straightforward sequel to the successful original movie you were in. Umpteenth sequels are played out. However, dress it up as sort of a reboot, sort of a delayed sequel -- as a reunion -- and you can get those people back. They're on board because it's "special" -- because you are openly acknowledging it's a trip down memory lane, an attempt to "get the band back together," rather than just soldiering on through a series of ordinary sequels whose only purpose is to make more money. (Of course, that's the only purpose of these reunions as well -- but by thinking of them as reunions, the actors can fool themselves into thinking it's more profound than that.)

I mean, what kind of curmudgeon doesn't want to go to a good reunion? As long as reunions are infrequent enough, it's the one time when the ironic and the sardonic can let themselves off the hook for having the detestable desire to care about something. If they go to a reunion ironically, it doesn't matter if they enjoy themselves genuinely.

Of course, movies like American Reunion don't only get back the really successful alums who have gone on to bigger and brighter things. (Most of the American Pie cast has not, actually -- but you could include Seann William Scott, Alyson Hannigan and possibly John Cho in that category). They also get back the actors who can only find work in movies in this series. Which, sadly for these folks, includes most of the rest of the cast.

The result? Everyone comes back, and you have the conditions in place for a possible -- possible -- hit.

Now, American Reunion may not be the greatest example overall. For one, most of this cast appeared in 2003's American Wedding, save only Chris Klein among the main characters as far as I can tell. (I haven't actually seen that movie.) For another, American Wedding was not technically the most recent movie in this series. The American Pie series includes about 17 straight-to-video sequels whose only representative from the original cast is Eugene Levy as "Jim's dad." (I don't think the character actually has a name -- I think his name is "Jim's dad.")

But we can see this same pattern in other franchises. The one that really struck me was 2009's Fast and Furious, which was pretty much a total reunion of the cast of The Fast and the Furious eight years earlier. The movie itself did not get great notices, but it was enough of a hit that it spawned another sequel that got both a good box office and some love from the critics.

The fact that Vin Diesel deigned to be in each of these past two movies is a bit of a mixture of both phenomena that can cause someone to come back for one of these reunions. In one sense, he was the big shot coming back to grace the little shots with his presence, and because it was "special," his reputation wouldn't be tainted by it. But on the other hand, Diesel hasn't really panned out to be the kind of box office star he thought he'd be -- so he actually really needed this work. And once others show their interest -- such as Dwayne Johnson, who appeared in Fast Five -- it's no longer just an "ironic reunion." It might, just might, become an ongoing force among franchises, fresh and genuinely revitalized.

I don't think that's necessarily going to happen here. I don't think we'll be seeing American Reunion 2 or anything like that. I mean, Stifler's jokes in the ads feel pretty musty, and truthfully, this cast is full of a bunch of has-beens. Even Seann William Scott is not getting the work he got two or three years ago. The poster pretty much acknowledges this reality, recommending that we (the viewer) "save the best piece for last." (Because that's definitely something no franchise has ever done -- say it's the last movie when it really isn't.)

So maybe this reunion will indeed just serve as their last hurrah, their chance to get together one more time, maybe give the audience a little last piece of what they loved from American Pie. It'll allow everyone to celebrate their own glory days one last time -- to fool themselves, momentarily, into thinking that what was is what still could be.

Lean & Mean

Here, let me publicize a question we've all asked each other at one point or another in the last couple months:

Does dropping two instances of the definite article really constitute a new title?

Oh but wait, they also turned that ungainly "and" into an ampersand. Which is much longer to type out as a word, but two characters shorter as a symbol.

Fast & Furious is, of course, a sequel/reboot/reimagining/reheating of The Fast and the Furious, which came out in 2001. In between there has been 2 Fast 2 Furious (one of my favorite titles of all time) and The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift.

The latest title invites some jokes, but we shouldn't be surprised. Here you are seeing brand recognition at its finest. Whether it really is a sequel or a reboot doesn't matter. The tagline is purposefully ambiguous about the answer to that question: "New Model. Original Parts." What matters is that this lean and mean new title allows you to imagine it as either. Subconsciously, it tells you that the product is back to some pure, undiluted version of itself.

You see, the third title in this series is what studios are trying to fight these days. Having a colon in your title was all the rage a couple years ago, but nowadays, it gives people a bad case of sequelitis. "Wait, so this third movie is now set in Tokyo? And there are none of the same characters? How far have we moved away from our original concept?" It's no surprise that Tokyo Drift earned only $62 million domestically, less than half of the $127 million made by its predecessor. Meanwhile, 2 Fast 2 Furious dropped only $17 million from the $144 million taken in by the original. Maybe it was that awesome title.

So with Fast & Furious, Universal is telling us, "Hey, this is the closest you're going to get to that first movie you loved." (Which wasn't really all that great, let's be honest.) Having Vin Diesel reappear for the first time certainly helps, but the title is what really drives it home. It says, "Let's get back to the basics. Only, a bit more rad."

Reboots have done this for a number of years now. Just think of last year's Rambo. Not surprisingly, it is the shortest title in the series, though Rambo III misses that by a mere three lean and mean roman numerals. (Nowadays, we would never see a movie called Rambo: First Blood Part II). Rambo basically says to you, "Forget all you think you know about John Rambo. This is the essential John Rambo, as that brief and memorable five-letter title will tell you." Sylvester Stallone seems to like that stuff. Rocky Balboa followed a similar idea, with the addition of the last name adding an authenticity that told you you were getting the real deal with this one. (Though I'm kind of shooting my point in the foot here, since the title Rocky Balboa actually has more letters than any other title in the series).

Star Trek is on board for this too. Even the original movie wasn't called Star Trek, it was Star Trek: The Motion Picture. (Talk about something you'll never seen again in a title). This Star Trek is making a conscious play for non-Trekkies, who get confused by concepts like "Wrath" and "Khan" and "The Undiscovered Country" in titles. It says, "Forget all that static, that Search for Spock, that Insurrection, that Nemesis. This is all you need to know and will ever need to know about Star Trek." We'll just have to see how they title the inevitable sequel.

The other thing the leanness and meanness of Fast & Furious does is it makes the title more vulgar, more pedestrian, more mainstream. If you think about it, the original title was highly poetic for a commercial action movie, almost literary. Or at the very least, it calls to mind other things entirely. It was very close to the title The Filth and the Fury, a 2000 documentary about the Sex Pistols. Other titles coming to mind: The Quick and the Dead, The Falcon and the Snowman (okay, that's different) and The Slow and the Dim-Witted (okay, I just made that up). Anyway, the point is, there's a certain high-brow quality, a certain intellect, to titles patterned The Blank and the Blank. The very phrasing is an embrace of abstractions. There are many things a movie about drag racing wants to be, but intellectual is not one of them.

But even if it were the exact same title, that's hardly something we should be surprised about either. Reboots go by the exact same title all the time, just as remakes do. The goal is not to make it easier to find in IMDB. They give you the year in parentheses if you want to do that. No, the goal is to put asses in the seats. And I can guarantee you Friday the 13th sold a lot more tickets with that title than it would have if it had been called Friday the 13th Part XII: Jason Joins Facebook.

The question is, will I see it? Nah. If I didn't even see 2 Fast 2 Furious, it's clear that no title is enough in itself to put my ass in that seat.