The First Fate of the Furious Trailer Is Not Great

Uh, where are the cars in this car movie?

byAaron Brown|
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In the first official trailer of the latest iteration of the Fast and the Furious movie franchise, you see family turning on each other, are introduced to new characters, are shown highly improbable action sequences, and notice a big lack of pure automotive scenes that this franchise was built on. Even though this disappoints us greatly, we're somehow not too shocked.

The third movie, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, — released in 2006 — was arguably the last work from the series dedicated to portraying some form of automotive culture and enthusiasm. Since then, the franchise has devolved into a string of crazy and unnecessary action-packed fight scenes. Remember that bank safe scene in Fast Five? Or how about the tank scene or the military airplane scene in Fast & Furious 6? Let's not forget the multiple times that cars were more airborne than planes in Furious 7.

It's scenes like those that have been completing ruining the franchise for us. From the looks of this trailer, The Fate of the Furious will be just as lame.

The trailer opens with a pack of Dodge Challengers (better get used to all that Fiat Chrysler product placement again) flying through a wall while being followed by several police vehicles. And then, a wrecking ball swings into the cars' path out of almost nowhere, directly striking several of the police cars. As everything seems to calm down, Dom Toretto (Vin Diesel) slams Luke Hobbs' (Dwayne Johnson) Land Rover Defender off the road. Throughout the rest of the trailer, the once family-loving Dom continues to engage in direct combat with his former loved ones.

Somehow, Hobbs, a federal agent, ends up in the same jail as former F&F villain, Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham), and a new evil female character, a "high-tech" terrorist named Cipher (Charlize Theron), keeps Dom under her thumb. The whole thing is pretty confusing, but if there's one thing we can tell, this will not be a car movie.

About two minutes into the trailer, the squad, including a reunited Hobbs and maybe-bad, maybe-good guy Shaw, are traveling across ice in a handful of different cars and a tank, while being chased by a massive submarine. ...Huh.

Sure, we're preaching to the choir here, but what happened to the R34 Nissan GT-Rs? The Evos? The late-night wrenching? The street-racing? The overnighting of parts from Japan? The change of theme from family-integrated underground car culture to top-level militant fighting wasn't exactly an abrupt one, but it is one that could stand to be reversed.

That doesn't appear to be where this series is headed, sadly.

Fate of the Furious opens in theaters April 14.

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