Fast'n'Fabulous

Screw The Avengers. The true super-hero franchise of this century is the Fast'n'Furious franchise. If you watch these movies, don't go with your snorting trumpet on, ready to denigrate the poor acting, the dodgy physics, the shit-like-this-would-never-in-real-life stunts. Watch the movies as the slow awakening of a gang of real life superheroes, discovering their awesome, supernatural powers and using them on the world.
They aren't even aware.
Superhero movies have long had their day. Their plots and characters and histories were largely conceived over 50 years ago, during a time when science was just about putting chrome on things and then putting those things on the moon. Superman and Batman pre-date the modern understanding of DNA. It was sufficient to explain things happening in superhero worlds by just saying "Super! Hero! POWER!"
These days, the superhero universe of The Avengers movies come across as kind of like the church's scrambling to update the wife-beating, slave-swapping days of B.C. to account for the invention of the telephone. And the birth-control pill. When the Hulk turns hulky and Ironman flies in a world still populated by electric cars which still have trouble finding power points, it's difficult, even for a clear-eyed believer like myself to not purse my lips to one side and grumble 'Oh, come on. How? Exactly?'

Fast'n'Furious doesn't need that justification. It doesn't need the weighty back story hanging about the narrative like a tracking bracelet on a first date: 'So, you've been explaining why it's there for about an hour now - can we get on with the action at hand?'

No, the characters in Fast'n'Furious are superheroes. They jump through walls. They drive through walls. They lift people with one hand. They drive at 200km/h while making out and not even needing to look at the road. They fly. They just do. The things they do to and with cars aren't the product of engineering miracles, or shoddy script-writing; these people are superheroes! Of course they can drop it into 9th gear and speed up and win! Super! Hero! POWER!

Every single movie is about superheroes who can change the world and triumph over adversity and they don't even know it. The why isn't important. It's the how that makes Fast'n'Furious a modern fable of gods walking among humans. As bright and escapist as Lord of the Rings and subtle as Tree of Life.

And don't even get me started on the gay subtext.

And someone else has already won a Pulitzer by making the very salient point that the F'n'F movies are the most important movies about race in 21st Century America extant.

*I know that the point has been made in the past that the Fast'n'Furious movies are about superheroes, but I'll be damned if I can find the original article. Anyone want to find it for me?