The Fast & Furious
series continues to drift into hyperbole, finding in Furious Seven its most ridiculous entry yet. It is 137 minutes of
improbable vehicular chaos, pausing only to reiterate its core cast’s affection
for one another. The series began as modest, loosely connected
heist/street-racing pictures before arriving in its fifth and sixth
installments at a perfect blend of heightened automotive action – dragging a
two-ton safe through Rio; racing a tank down an elevated highway – and sincere
lunkhead melodrama playing off the reassembled ensemble’s family dynamic. Sure,
cars went flying and the plots became tangled webs of backstory. But the
brotherly bond that built up between Paul Walker and Vin Diesel, and the chummy
affection amongst the whole diverse gang (Michelle Rodriguez, Tyrese Gibson,
Ludacris, Jordana Brewster) anchored the fast, often clever, action in good
feelings.
Now here we are, seven films deep, and the series’ usual
screenwriter Chris Morgan continues the typical pattern of sequel escalation,
adding new characters and heightening the stakes. This time, a resourceful evil
British assassin (Jason Statham) is hunting our team of drivers. See, they
burned his villainous brother (Luke Evans) in Furious 6, so he wants to make sure they blow up real good. It’s a
revenge plot, and the blood runs quickly. One teammate is killed, as teased in
the previous installment’s credits. Their best frenemy (Dwayne Johnson) is
hospitalized. And then Dom (Diesel) barely escapes with his life when his house
is bombed. This means war, and a different kind of action movie than this
series has been.
Instead of spending their time drag racing or heisting, though
they do each for a scene, the gang decides to work with a mysterious military
man (Kurt Russell). He offers them help defeating their new enemy in exchange
for finding a MacGuffin held by a hacker (Nathalie Emmanuel) who has been
kidnapped by a terrorist (Djimon Hounsou) and his henchman (Tony Jaa). What
follows is a blitz of violence and movement, in sequences that feature such
sights as: cars parachuting out of a plane, two people surviving a rollover
accident down a mountain, a sports car careening safely between skyscrapers,
and a climax involving a helicopter, a drone, a supercomputer, crumbling
buildings, and a bajillion bullets that wouldn’t look out of place in the third
act of any superhero movie.
Fast & Furious movies
are no stranger to the absurd, the dubious, the gleefully stupid, and the
charmingly outsized. But Furious Seven
is the most mostness of all of them. It’s chockablock with exotic locales, roaring
engines, bruising hand-to-hand combat, convenient technological assists,
last-second escapes, huge explosions, and lasciviously objectified women in
bikinis. It’s amped up, and trying hard to be. Perhaps it’s the influence of
the director, James Wan, taking over from Justin Lin, who had directed the last
four entries. Wan, he of Saw and The Conjuring in his first non-horror
effort, seems extra sure to hit the required elements of a F&F film hard, leaving the audience happy to have received not
just what they’d hoped to see, but so much of it at once.
Instead of building with each scene, Seven is all exhausting crescendo. A few times, the movie tipped over into exasperated monotony, often leaving me worn
out, eyes rolling. The action sequences aren’t as infectiously exciting. The
movie basically admits it, with the “don’t try this at home” disclaimer buried
deep in the credits instead of prominently displayed. (At least the characters
are at one point worried about a concussion.) The loud, silly action is the
series’ biggest and craziest, sometimes entertaining, but hardly the most
satisfying. I idly wondered if the filmmakers hoped to stun an audience with an
overdose of exaggerated mayhem into forgetting the action’s just not as clever
or memorably staged this time. In fact, the fistfights are better than the car
chases. And who goes to one of these excited to see the punching?
Yet, when I managed to shake off my doubts, I found myself
enjoying the ride more than not. This is a perpetual motion machine
manipulating the audience with jolts of adrenaline and sensation. It’s
scattered, characters appearing and disappearing when required for an action
beat (Brewster gets less screen time than the product placement for Corona and
Abu Dhabi), and emotional threads loosely strung (flashbacks flashing by to get
teary-eyed about the past). But all this overstuffed muchness is in service of
a thunderous series finale feeling rolling over the film. This finality is
partially due to star Paul Walker’s untimely death mid-shoot, his unfilmed
scenes finished with effects, doubles, and old footage, the ending doubling as
a sweetly mawkish tribute. But it is also partially for the way the film
gathers up familiar faces, events, and vehicles from throughout the franchise
for what these characters (and Universal’s marketing) call “one last ride.” I
doubt it will be, but I don’t know how much further over the top they can go.
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