2 Fast 2 Furious | North Miami Avenue Start Line — Four Cars Waiting on a Green Light

The movie's first frames are a green light on North Miami Avenue. Four cars — Brian's silver Skyline, Suki's pink S2000, Slap Jack's Supra, Orange Julius's RX-7 — sat on a start grid the production built by closing the avenue north of downtown and dressing the low blocks around the old fire station at 1401 North Miami Avenue with barricades, spectators and generator light. John Singleton shot the launch wide, letting the corridor of warehouses, surface lots and squat two-storey storefronts run away toward the horizon. That corridor is the reason the sequence still reads as Miami rather than any anonymous American downtown.

Come at night and the avenue is quieter than the film suggests. The fire station has been given over to a market and event space, its apparatus doors kept as a facade. The parking lots that gave the camera its width have mostly gone vertical: condo towers, a Metromover track overhead, construction hoarding on three corners. What survives is the run itself — long, flat, straight, four lanes wide, with the traffic lights spaced far enough apart that you can see three of them turn green at once.

Stand at the corner of 14th Street and watch that happen. It is the only effect in the opening scene that Miami still performs for free.

Photo: Shoreland Arcade, downtown Miami, by Wally Gobetz (Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).