What 'Fast And Furious' Can Learn From Its Bollywood Counterpart
The "rule of cool" is when a film stretches the limits of disbelief in exchange for doing something awesome. There is no greater devotee to the altar of the rule of cool in American cinema than the Fast and Furious franchise, which will gladly shatter the boundaries of reality in exchange for letting us watch the Rock redirect a torpedo with his bare hands.
Does it make sense? Not in the slightest. Is it awesome? You're damn right it is. But with the 9th installment of the franchise sending its characters to space and a 10th and an 11th movie still on the way, the Fast saga might be having a hard time trying to one-up its own level of insanity/awesomeness. (Or "insawesomeness" as we're now calling it.)
It's why we talked last week about how people are pushing for a Fast and Furious/Jurassic Park Crossover. But there's another alternative to upping the "awesanity" (not as good) if, for whatever reason, the executives over at Universal Pictures can't strike a deal to get Dom Toretto gassing up his ride with literal fossil fuels. The Fast and Furious franchise can instead borrow from Bollywood, specifically, the Bollywood franchise Dhoom.
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It's only fair because the Dhoom franchise borrowed from the Fast saga first. The plot of the first Dhoom is basically the plot of the first Fast and Furious except with motorbikes instead of cars, and the insanity turned up to a 14. The movie franchises then diverge from there, but the level of insanity stays the same. I'm about to show you a scene from Dhoom 2 that is so incredibly nuts that it can't be put into words, but I'll try my best. A thief parachutes onto a moving train, containing the Queen of England and the Crown Jewels of the Royal Family. He then infiltrates the train in full-bodied makeup, costume, and prosthetics disguised as the queen, steals the crown somehow, and then escapes while using his sky-board to deflect bullets. Also, he uses the train as a jet ski.
It's impossibly stupid, but just as equally impossibly awesome, and it's that kind of ethos which we've come to love in the Fast and Furious franchise. So why not go all the way? Take all of the great action Bollywood tropes like hard cuts to the heroes in badass posses and saying the name of the movie out loud eight times with a sound cue. And, of course, you have to have the dance numbers. Okay, we know this one might be a harder sell, but you can't tell me Hobbs and Shaw wouldn't have been a better movie if Hobbs and shaw had done this:
Bollywood knows how to have fun above all else, and all we're sayings is that if Fast and Furious wants to keep the fun going even a little bit longer, it wouldn't hurt to take notes. Or, again, they can go with the Jurassic Park crossover thing
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Top Image: Universal Pictures
