The Fast and the Furious franchise is probably the greatest guilty pleasure film series out there. While it’s had its low points, the second they shifted the series from street racing to heists and revenge plots, the series was injected with new life and, with it, new characters and wildly entertaining action spectacles. Fast Five and Furious 6 introduced a new level of destruction along with Dwayne Johnson’s wonderful character to the series, but Furious 7 takes all the elements of both of those films and amplifies it to a degrees so ridiculous you can’t help but laugh for stupid joy. James Wan’s next installment has the potential to be the most fun and over-the-top film of the series.
In Furious 7, Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham), the brother of the villain in Furious 6, is seeking to avenge his brother by hunting down Toretto (Vin Diesel) and his family. As a British secret assassin, he proves to be a formidable and unstoppable foe, so Toretto and Co must work with Mr. Nobody (Kurt Russell) from a secret US government team to track down a hacker and her God’s Eye device so that they can find and kill Shaw before he gets to them first.
Fast and beautiful cars, hot women, insane and explosive action, good tunes, awesome camera work, terrible dialogue and some really cheesy melodramatic scenes. This is what you can expect from Furious 7. No more, no less. It was great seeing Jason Statham as an unstoppable baddie, but it was even better watching him and Vin going at it throughout the film. He started out as the main villain but then became small fries when Djimon Hounou’s character entered the picture. There is so much unadulterated, testosterone driven joy in this two+ hour movie that it’ll be hard for action fans to not love it.
While there are plenty of scenes that will make you go “ok, like that could ever happen,” this is a film where you have to suspend your disbelief. I’m ok with all of the over-the-top action scenes, like watching a $3.4 million Lykan HyperSport drive out of a skyscraper, land in another, then shoot out the other side to land inside another skyscraper. It was insane to watch, laughable even, but so much fun. I can accept these things. What I couldn’t accept was seeing how Paul Walker’s character could keep up with Tony Jaa’s villainous Kiet. The guy is an action legend and I just couldn’t let that the fact that he wasn’t destroying Brian go. The same could be said when Ronda Rousey entered the picture.
The aforementioned highly unlikely matchup is the first thing I disliked about the movie. The other two things I couldn’t stand were the terrible dialogue during the cheesy romance/caring scenes and the emphasis on family. The theme of this franchise is family and because Paul Walker died, they made sure that whenever there wasn’t’ action, they would pound the virtues of family and sticking with them into the audiences head. We get it, family is important. Can we finally move on and leave it as a backdrop? Also, the scenes between Michelle Rodriguez and Vin Diesel were terrible. They wanted to show Letty struggling with her memory loss and Dom comforting her, but it just got sickening after a while.
While the death of Paul Walker delayed the production of Furious 7 and saddened those that loved him, the film was able to press on but, when you see the film, you could barely tell that he hadn’t filmed all his scenes. That’s how flawless of a job James Wan, the VFX folks and the editors did on making sure the film was able to still work without the real Paul Walker being there. They also added a nice tribute at the end of the film that’s sure to bring tears to some peoples’ eyes, but before that, they had to prepare you with a scene by saying that no one would ever forget him.
With James Wan making his first action film, you could see he was taking cues from various sources. I found that he clearly wanted to expand on the massive action scenes that Justin Lin brought to the table, but he also wanted to add smaller, more interesting choices as well. The thing I noticed the most was the camerawork, it was clearly influence by the way Gareth Edwards shot The Raid and it really elevated the hand to hand combat scenes, giving them a visual flair that most people haven’t seen.
Overall, dialogue and melodrama excluded, I absolutely loved Furious 7. It had a great score and soundtrack, unreal action, some solid comedic relief (thanks Tyrese Gibson and Ludacris) but, most importantly, it checks off nearly every single box that an action fan wants in their film with the bonus of having a handful of high-profile action stars to support those boxes (Diesel, Johnson, Statham and Jaa). There is no question, Furious 7 is THE film to see this weekend.
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