Back in 2001, A nice little summer action film called The Fast and the Furious was released by Universal. At the time, this studio had an unusual knack for putting out good teen movies: American Pie, Bring It On, Blue Crush and 8 Mile all came out around the turn of the millennia. (it wasn’t all money in the bank, though: Mystery Men and Josie and the Pussycats were well-regarded duds of the same era).

The Fast and The Furious was a big hit: It had everything one was looking for in escapist summer entertainment, and tied into the red-hot custom-import racing subculture. Kids from New Jersey and San Dimas to Osaka and Hong Kong were tricking out their Hondas and Mazdas with high-performance gear and retina-thrashing paintjobs and raced them in the streets, and the film captured the look and feel of this phenomenon well.

As far as the story went, however, the movie was a Studebaker: A creaky old chestnut of a script about an undercover cop infiltrating a street gang to get to a criminal mastermind. This was the basic story of White Heat (1949), lots of exploitation films from the fifties, too many biker films from the seventies, Point Break and The Departed (2006), which was at least Oscar-worthy.

But sometimes all you need is a sexy cast to sell a frozen leftover plot, and TFATF had that in abundance. Paul Walker was Brian O’Connor the undercover cop, surfer-boy cute. The bald, buff, improbably East Coast accented Vin Diesel was Dominic Toretto, the bad guy (or was he?). Ingenues Michelle Rodriguez and Jordana Brewster were the love interests.

Breakout roles for all four actors, and predictably when it came time to make the sequel (2 Fast 2 Furious, 2003) only Paul Walker showed up. Vin Diesel and director Rob Cohen moved on to try at international spy thrillers with the remarkably stiff xXx. The girls moved on as well– not to better things, however. Jordana was in the laughably bad D.E.B.S. and Michelle Rodriguez– Well, she was in Bloodrayne and a few episodes of “Lost.”

Despite the presence of Tyrese Gibson and Eva Mendes, 2 Fast 2 Furious suffered the inevitable fate of all franchised enterprises: Diminishing returns. It’s that damned rule that says that if you output the exact same product over and over again, you will get less return on investment every time. In Hollywood, this isn’t always the law (here are some nice examples) but generally Police Academy rules apply.

Speaking of which– According to the IMDb, Police Academy 8 is scheduled to be released in 2011. Which is a good thing, because the world is scheduled to come to an end the year after that.

Universal wasn’t done with the custom-import thing yet, so out came another sequel: The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift in 2006. Everyone involved with the original had jettisoned at this point. Zachery Ty Brian, Who played Tim Allen’s doofusy kid Brad in “Home Improvement,” was fourth-billed. It went nowhere, did nothing. No surprise: It was very much in line with how diminishing returns works. The studio was trying to squeeze just one more release out of a bone-dry franchise.

Ta-dah! Here comes a brand new one, set to release in April 2009. It’s starkly named Fast & Furious. But the puzzling part: Paul Walker, Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez and Jordana Brewster are all back. For the life of me, I cannot think of another circumstance where all the initial leads of a franchise have ditched en masse, and then reassembled far downstream, with a block of irrelevant sequels between them and the original.

Perhaps the hard fiscal realities of the present time and the somewhat modest career arcs of the principals in the last few years made this do-over inevitable. And Universal is positively giddy about branding this release as being exactly the same movie as the first one. Its tagline says it all: “New Model. Original Parts.” The pre-release poster features not a customized Japanese racecar but Dominic’s totemic 1970 Dodge Charger from the first movie.

Best is the trailer, which I had the pleasure of running across in HD last night. It detailed the heist of a super-long gas truck by our leads. With the exception of the fact they were jacking an oh-so-valuable gas truck (which dates the thing to this summer’s gas-price spike) and the stated location of said jacking (The Dominican Republic, according to the titles, apparently in a part of that island nation that looks just like the desert north of Los Angeles), they did the exact same thing in the first movie.

Which is the point, apparently.

–Skot C.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 6th, 2009 at 1:19 pm and is filed under Acting, Ancilliaries, General, Long Tail, Marketing, Motion Pictures, Oscars!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.