LOL: Director Oliver Stone Slams Fast And Furious, John Wick for Lack of Realism

Just don't ask Oliver Stone about the franchise, or he'll fill your ear with complaints about how the Fast and Furious flicks are dumb, senseless entertainment. They're not just unrealistic but disgusting and a complete waste of time. Oh, them's fightin' words!

Oscar-winning director Oliver Stone has singled out Fast and Furious films, the John Wick franchise, and the MCU films as the best examples of how Hollywood is selling out by churning only people-pleasing, unrealistic, basically worthless big-budget productions. The comments come via a Variety interview on the occasion of Stone's being honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2023 Transilvania Film Festival in Romania. Also there, he promoted his pro-nuclear-energy documentary Nuclear Now, which he described as his most difficult project so far because Hollywood is so woke and so afraid of nuclear power that no one would fund it.

Speaking of Hollywood, just how worthless are the movies it promotes these days? In a passionate comment, Stone lamented the fate of the film industry, where only big-budget productions get greenlit on purely financial considerations, which, in turn, makes them worthless, unrealistic pieces of garbage. When making a profit is all you care about, any artistic consideration goes out the window, so you cater exclusively to your audience.

He then named productions like the Fast movies, John Wick, and comic book-based superhero flicks.

"How many cars can crash? How many stunts can you do? What's the difference between Fast and Furious and some other film? It’s just one thing after another. Whether it’s a super-human Marvel character or just a human being like John Wick, it doesn’t make any difference. It’s not believable," Stone said. He also described John Wick 4 as "f***ing disgusting" because it plays out like a video game in which Keanu Reeves' character kills like three or four hundred people.

But it's not the violence or the explosions that Stone is bothered about, but rather the way they're presented. Ironically, back when Oliver Stone was getting started as a big-time film director, he did it with films that, at the time, were controversial for the way they glamorized violence, sometimes unrealistically so. These are also the films that have earned him the reputation he enjoys today, like Natural Born Killers, Platoon, or Born on the 4th of July, staples of modern cinema.

Stone clearly makes the distinction between his own work and the films he picks on by means of the realism of the scenes. Realism is key, even in the fictional universe of the movies. Stone apparently believes you can't shoot a Pontiac Fiero into space if you strap a rocket engine to it. Incredible, we know!

Jokes aside, Stone's criticism of these films is the same argument used by other industry people and newcomers to these franchises. These and Stone himself have long presented themselves as the gatekeepers of filmmaking as an art form, where they criticize big-budget productions while lamenting the fate of the industry.

These films are not realistic, and they're not quality filmmaking either, they say. And they're right, too – Stone included. As iconic as Fast and Furious is, and regardless of how many gazillions of dollars it made at the box office, there's little (if anything) about the entire franchise in terms of actual storytelling, character portrayal, or realism. These films and those others singled out by Stone thrive on their proud disregard of realism, and they do so to such an extent that they're able to carve out a new universe of their own.

These films are instead a new form of entertainment and, by extension, a new type of filmmaking, one where suspension of disbelief is a must to even make it through the opening credits, marked by high-octane, visually-striking but totally impossible CGI and physical stunts. They're form over substance. They shock the viewer and numb the brain, but they’re also highly enjoyable if you take them for what they are. Leading actor Vin Diesel and Stone are the only ones to speak of the Fast films as if they're more than mindless entertainment, bread and circuses. And cars put to use in the most unexpected and spectacular ways.

Oliver Stone insists he's not bitter or jealous that Fast makes more money than his most recent films put together, and he probably isn't. But he's definitely out of touch. Only Diesel is that out of touch, for believing his Toretto character has any shot at an Oscar – if we're to believe certain online reports.