Everyone in the Fast and Furious Family has two key traits
There are families you are born into, there are families you find, and there are families that you assemble from three barely related 2000s films because they have incredible franchise potential.
The 22-year journey from The Fast and the Furious to Fast X notoriously does not follow a clean arc, or even a logical one. The earlier movies have been run through the Hollywood chop shop and stripped for parts, and a modestly budgeted street-level action film about drag-racing thieves has effectively been rebuilt as a series of bombastic superhero films with cars more kitted out than Iron Man. This extends to the core cast of characters, dubbed the Fast Family.
Why are they family? As far as I can tell, it’s because Vin Diesel, as Dominic Toretto, says “I don’t got friends. I got family” in Fast Five. Ever since then, the franchise stewards have decided that the movies are About That.
Making the Fast and Furious films about a sprawling found family has proven to be a boon to the films’ writers, as they have decided this means that the movies can mostly be about one guy — Toretto. Everyone else is kinda just there to support him. They’re a single multi-ethnic unit where no one really has a story of their own, but everyone has something to offer.
Namely, they all have two traits: a skill and a quirk. Or sometimes they have two skills, or two quirks. A couple of them even have the same traits. Like the cars, the rules are a bit fast and loose.
These are, as it stands going into Fast X, the core members of the Fast Family. Most are centered around Dominic Toretto or Brian O’Conner. (Actor Paul Walker died in 2013, but his character, Brian, is still alive in the Fast-verse — he’s just retired and raising his kids off-camera,
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