This Renegade reporter has gone on record to profess his fandom for all things Fast and Furious, particularly the ending of the latest installment which sets up Fast and Furious 7 in an exciting way. (Note: don’t click that link in the previous sentence if you haven’t seen it yet; there are spoilers.) More interesting is the selection of director James Wan as a successor to Justin Lin. Known more for atmospheric, low budget horror films like Insidious and the upcoming The Conjuring (as well as Insidious: Chapter 2), Wan was an unlikely candidate to take over the high octane series. But the box office returns of Wan’s films have yielded very favorable results on very little money spent, and have been good films to boot (yes, even Saw – you know, the first one before everything got so darned convoluted), a testament to his skill as a director. So, what fun does Wan have in store for us as he prepares to start playing around in the Fast and Furious sandbox? In an interview with Indiewire’s The Playlist, Wan states:
“I really like the theme of this next one that we’re going with. I can’t really talk about it, but I like the theme; it’s one that I really relate to. Then there’s the drive of Number Seven, which was set up at the end of Number Six, which is a classic revenge story. I’m a big [genre] fan, so that’s how I’m approaching it: I’m looking at it like a gritty, ’70s revenge thriller, but one that still fits into the ‘Fast and Furious’ series.”
Given the introduction of the Toretto crew’s next antagonist in the post-credits sequence of Fast 6, and Wan’s citing films like Death Wish and The French Connection as sources of inspiration for his spin on the Fast merry-go-round, sounds like a plan. There’s still sure to be a lot of vehicular mayhem and globetrotting to behold in the next Fast sequel (story locations already confirmed include Tokyo, Los Angeles and the Middle East), but steering the proceedings towards a more realistic revenge thriller (well, as realistic as one can get given the subject matter, anyway) would be a valiant attempt to keep breathing life into the series that has become a box office behemoth.
Source: The Playlist
