Fast And The Furious Actors Can Never, Ever Look Like Wimps

The currency of the Hollywood action hero is masculinity and dominance. The big boys have to ensure they don't look like wimps compared to their peers. And of course, OF COURSE, hysterical male insecurity is on full display behind the scenes of the Fast & Furious movies. Vin Diesel, Dwayne Johnson, and Jason Statham can never let anyone else get the upper hand in their (completely staged) fights.

According to The Wall Street Journal, all these men have different "systems" in place to ensure that they remain the alpha dog in each fight scene. Statham has a contractual limit to how badly he can get his butt kicked. Johnson has a team of personal fight coordinators and editors who are there to make sure he's always looking good. Diesel's sister is a producer on the series, and one of her many responsibilities is to keep Dominic Toretto from getting punched too often, because getting punched is a sign of weakness in movies about punching people.

The insecurity is so intense that at one point during Fast Five, Diesel suggested they keep a running count of how often the characters hit one another so he could always have an equal or greater number of punches. (Compare all this to Jackie Chan, who routinely gets his butt kicked onscreen while courting death in real life nonstop.)

All three characters are each other's antagonists, but none of them are the villain -- at least, not anymore. All of their confrontations have to end in a draw. Deus ex machina moments have to be built in to cut off fights before anyone can definitively come out on top. It's like the complicated relationship between Batman and Superman, but with three Batmans. These three will be locked in an eternal stalemate, forever doomed to being good guys who punch each other, but out of respect, bro, because they're fambly.

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For more, check out Everyone's A Dummy In The 'Game Of Thrones' Finale Script and Ben Affleck's Canceled Batman Movie Sounds Pretty Cool.

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