Back from the dead: can the new Fast and Furious movie really ‘reunite' Vin Diesel and Paul Walker?
If you're a fan of the Fast and Furious franchise – and you're only human, so of course you are – then you'll know that Fast X ended on one of the most operatically daft cliffhangers of all time. In short, Ludacris and Tyrese Gibson are apparently dead, having been shot out of the sky by a double agent. Vin Diesel seems certain to die, having ended the film at the bottom of a dam that Jason Momoa just exploded. And Gal Gadot is back. And the Rock is back.
All these threads need to be resolved urgently. And yet, Fast X was a box-office disappointment. The fourth most expensive film ever made, Fast X was the fifth highest-grossing film of 2023 and still managed to lose $20m. And suddenly the prospects of a sequel looked dimmer and dimmer. Or at least they did, until Vin Diesel stumbled across a foolproof plan to revive the franchise forever: human resurrection.
This weekend, Diesel appeared at FuelFest, a car enthusiast event in California. During his speech, Diesel gave an insight into how Fast and Furious 11 could make people excited about the series again. 'The studio said to me, 'Vin, can we please have the finale of Fast and Furious [in] April 2027?' I said, 'Under three conditions.' First is to bring the franchise back to LA! The second thing was to return to the car culture, to the street racing! The third thing was reuniting Dom and Brian O'Conner.'
Now, within the context of Fast X, none of these things make sense. You cannot make a film where Rome gets nuked and Spain is devastated by a 30bn-gallon dam collapse, and then pretend like none of it happened so you can make a scaled-back little car-racing film in LA. Unless Fast 11 starts with Dominic Toretto waking up in a cold sweat and growling 'Woah, I thought I was involved in one of the most egregiously ugly CGI blowouts in all of movie history, but it was just a crazy dream!' then the series cannot simply reset itself like this.
More worrying, though, is the promise to reunite Toretto and Brian O'Conner. This is for the simple reason that O'Conner was played by Paul Walker, and Paul Walker died 12 years ago. Needless to say, that didn't stop them before. When Walker died, he was in the middle of making Furious 7, and production brought in his brothers to act as body doubles before VFX house Weta grafted a digital copy of Walker's face on top of it. The results were actually fairly convincing, but this is arguably because the job was easier. The bulk of Walker's performance had already been committed to tape, so they could carefully weave in additional shots without drawing too much attention.
But bringing the character back for an entirely new performance is something else entirely. They would have to create a digital Walker from scratch, and then convincingly voice him. You don't need to be told that it's tough to do it well. The Star Wars series has tried it repeatedly, with everyone from Peter Cushing to Carrie Fisher, and there is always something creepily plastic about the execution. Not even turning Harold Ramis into a ghost for Ghostbusters: Afterlife could mask how off-putting he looked. And the orgy of digitally created multiverse cameos that ended The Flash was the ugliest thing to be put on screen since, well, Vin Diesel drove down the side of a dam.
Surely the Fast and Furious franchise doesn't need to debase itself by taking a beloved co-star and yanking him around like a puppet. You have to imagine that Diesel's intention is to cut back on the full-tilt bombast and return to something with real emotional depth, but in reality that means he'll have to spend a lot of his time emoting at a tennis ball, which doesn't exactly scream nuance.
Plus, as much as I hate to say it, people don't go and see Fast and Furious films for emotional complexity. They go because they want to see stuff smash into other stuff, ideally when some of it is on fire. If Fast 11 wants to pay tribute to Walker, then doing it in the credits might be the best way to go. After all, it's hard to pay tribute to a colleague when there's an exploding dam to outrun.
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