No matter how ridiculous or improbable the Fast and Furious series became on its
journey from humble street-racing Point
Break riff to international heist pictures to blockbuster secret agent
spectacles (what an evolution!), it always retained its emotional core. Until
now. Even at peak jump-the-shark, when Seven
had characters not only jump a sports car between the upper levels of two
gigantic skyscrapers, but also survive multiple head-on collisions and a
rollover accident down the side of a rocky cliff, it could still manage an
emotional sendoff to the late Paul Walker. (Play the opening notes of “See You
Again” and even the stoniest of gearhead hearts might melt a smidge.) They may
have become unbelievable vehicular superheroes, but they still really cared
about each other and even their most outlandish feats made sense in the context
of the lengths they’d go to show that love. Alas, the eight installment in the
seemingly unstoppable franchise, The Fate
of the Furious, ditches its core consistency of character relationships for
a misguided attempt to mix it up. It’s almost fun – starting with a silly
street race prologue and some dark notes of discord – but then bungles the
execution.
This time out Dom (Vin Diesel), the patriarch of the
makeshift family, betrays them and joins forces with Cypher (the great Charlize
Theron, a welcome if underutilized addition), a hacker bent on sending our team
chasing her fetch quests. She wants the world to fear her, so she needs weapons
of mass destruction. Makes sense. But the leverage she has over Dom to force
him to help her, kept fruitlessly secret for the bulk of the runtime, only goes
so far. Sure, it’s a tortured melodramatic twist, but the movie doesn’t milk
suspense out of the betrayal. His friends pulled into the conflict (Ludacris,
The Rock, Tyrese, Michelle Rodriguez, and Nathalie Emmanuel), chasing him down
New York City streets and across frozen lakes, register only mild
disappointment in his switch, and shrug when the truth of his
double-double-cross is revealed. They’re too busy outrunning a nuclear
submarine or avoiding fleets of technologically hijacked self-driving cars.
Those are cool, goofy, over-the-top sequences full of revving engines, spinning
wheels, and crashes both real and digital. But when director F. Gary Gray (who
usually has decent thriller instincts; see The
Negotiator or the chases in his Italian
Job) simply cuts between careening car coverage and close ups of the people
behind the wheels without thinking about what they’re thinking, it’s hard to
care. The film has Idiot Plot in the extreme, keeping characters (and often us)
outside important information while exhibiting no curiosity about how anyone
would react in these topsy-turvy scenarios.
Screenwriter Chris Morgan has created a world in which every
villain, no matter how horrible their actions, eventually becomes their friend.
It made sense when undercover cop Walker fell in love with their ethos and fell
in with their grey-area car culture back in the first movie. And it even (sort
of) made sense that lawman The Rock would, despite chasing after them,
begrudgingly call on their help in Part 6. Here we have Jason Statham, who has
previously murdered one of their best
friends and blew up Dom’s house,
freed from prison by mysterious government suits (Kurt Russell and Scott
Eastwood) to join the team. How do the characters feel about this? Other than a
few joshing quips thrown his way and a one-scene threat of Rock-sized
retribution, it fades away as he becomes just another familiar face behind the
wheel. In this context, no wonder Dom can willy-nilly switch sides and its
nothing more than a MacGuffin for the plot engine strung between the action. it
hardly matters what anyone does because everyone can survive and anyone can be
redeemed.
Now the stakes can be nuclear war and the movie, aptly
dropping the fast from the title, feels turgid and vacant and slow and, worst
of all, just plain boring. This has been a series so good at retooling, I hope
they can find a better route next time. They had such a good escalation going
for six films, building on what works and pivoting before it got stale. But now it’s stuck in a futile need to top themselves with each outing, going bigger, dumber, louder, longer. The strain is showing. This one has
apocalyptic stakes and yet nothing to care about. Characters and cars careen
through cartoonish outlandish destruction without breaking a sweat, or an
emotional beat that lands anything but false. To the extent it's watchable, it is because it's drifting off affection for its own past.
