New Fast & Furious Promo Is Amazing and Insulting

Do you have trouble remembering which movies are Fast & Furious movies? This perplexing UK promo, which is not only for F9 but the entire franchise, is here to help by telling you exactly what makes one of these movies, beginning with “cars.” There are cars in the Fast & Furious movies. Who knew?!

Okay, I beg you to watch this video, which will take up less than two minutes of your time but might take you all day to fully process:

On the one hand, this is idiotic on so many levels. You simply cannot say “if there are ‘explosions’ it’s a Fast & Furious movie,” because while they certainly include them, the franchise is only a small circle in the Venn diagram of “movies with explosions in them.” Also, it’s borderline insulting to effectively say “if people are calling Vin Diesel ‘Dom’, it’s a Fast & Furious movie” because we all know there are no other movies where Diesel plays a character named Dom, that’s not how movies work. The promo feels like it thinks we’re imbeciles who need to be reminded F&F movies include things like “plans” and “bad guys” and “fights.” Also, you’re going to say these movies are “fast” and then fail to give me a “furious” category? Shame on you.

On the other hand, this trailer is kind of utterly amazing? The way it presents lightning-fast montages of the incredibly basic things that make virtually the entirety of the action movie genre replicates the experience of watching the action-heavy rapid cuts of a Fast & Furious flick. Plus, these tiny highlight reels of the movies’ various elements are incredibly satisfying to watch, while “it goes down like this” is a very, very good reminder of how fun these movies are. It makes me very excited to see F9, so on that level it’s certainly successful.

But my brain cannot process the simultaneously awesome and insulting duality of the promo, and I just can’t choose one of the other. I can, however, watch this video 18 more times in a row in hopes of figuring it out.

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