Movie review--Furious 7

As I stepped out of the theater after watching Furious 7, I wondered what legendary Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein would have thought of the movie.  I had no doubt that he would have been impressed by film makers whose muse was unfettered by concepts such as logic, traffic laws, or the laws of physics.

Lest you think I am being derisive about the latest installment in the most improbable movie franchise of all time, think again.  The Fast and Furious franchise has done something remarkable—most franchises get steadily more derivative as they go along; F&F has gotten increasingly creative. The first movie was a small little film about an undercover cop (Paul Walker) infiltrating the street racing milieu of Los Angeles through its ringleader (Vin Diesel), then the series evolved into something with international crime capers and black ops in the Caucus Mountains.

Furious 7 finally clarifies the loop-the-loop time line of the series, explaining (at last) why the guy who died in film #3 (the abominable Tokyo Drift; if that movie couldn’t kill the series, it was unkillable) was around in movies 4, 5 and 6.  Surprisingly, it doesn’t involve time travel but a series of plot devices that are only slightly less plausible.  Furious 7 pays homage to Die Hard 3 by having the brother of the bad guy in Fast & Furious 6 seek revenge; naturally he starts by traveling to Tokyo to take out the least memorable member of the team he holds responsible for his brother being in the tender care of the British medical system.

Fast Five invigorated the series by introducing the character of Hobbs, played by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson; Fast & Furious 6 added Gina Carano to the mix.  Furious 7 puts Johnson mostly on the sideline (along with, once again, Jordana Brewster, who hasn’t gotten to do anything other than hold babies for three films) but adds Nathalie Emmanual from Game of Thrones, Jason Statham as the bad guy, and Kurt Russell as “Mr. Nobody.”  I can’t remember the last time I saw an actor so clearly enjoying himself as Russell does here; he fully embraces the ludicrousness of his characters and just runs with it, with a twinkle in his eye.

It is too bad Staham is relegated to being the bad guy; he does “menace” well, but as with Jet Li in Lethal Weapon 3, it means he inevitably has to lose a fight to a character who is a much less skilled fighter.  In fact, throughout the film he is described as “unstoppable” but he always gets stopped.  His go to move when losing a mano-a-mano fight is to chuck a grenade at his opponent and assume that he’ll be clear of the blast radius when it goes off.  The really weird thing is that he keeps trying to kill the team that put his brother in the hospital while they are engaged in acts that would probably result in them being killed anyway, if he just let nature take its course.

My favorite line from Fast & Furious Six was when Diesel’s character, Dom, caught his amnesiac girlfriend Letty in mid-air and they land on a car, and she asks, “How did you know there would be a car to break our fall?”  Only in the F&F universe is a car made of metal and glass considered a soft landing place for people falling from a great height.  It is hard to even consider the good guys to be in peril when there is always the option of driving a car off a cliff, or out of a skyscraper, or off a parking garage, and then walking away.

Again, I do not mean this as criticism exactly. The difference between a good action film and a stupid action film is the width of a hair, and Furious 7 clearly falls on the “good” side.  All action films are stupid and implausible, a fact accurately but inartistically made by the movie The Last Action Hero.  When a bad action movie has a stunt that makes no sense, it irritates you; when a good one does it, you write it off to artistic license.  In The Mummy 2 the main characters outrun the sunrise to get inside a building; Roger Ebert correctly pointed out this meant they were running at more than 1,000 miles per hour.  He’s right, but I liked the film so I didn’t care.  Besides, nothing in Furious 7 could possibly be more ridiculous that the scene in Fast and Furious 5 where two cars dragged a safe weighing several tons through the streets of Rio at high speed.

My biggest criticism, and this is personal, is that Lucas Black wasn’t allowed to join the main cast, other than a brief cameo.  Black was the star of the Walker-less and Diesel-less F&F Tokyo Drift, and when I tried (and failed) to watch that movie I suddenly realized where I had seen him before—he arched an eyebrow at a certain angle, and I suddenly remembered him as a child actor in the one season wonder TV show American Gothic.  It somehow would have made sense to have him jump from F&F 3 to F&F 7 and join the team.

I didn’t care for the direction of Furious 7, which lacked the smoothness and grace of former director Justin Lin (fun fact—Lin’s prior directing gig before Fast and furious 5 was the legendary paintball episode of Community, possibly the best directed episode of a TV comedy ever). But the stunts were well-executed and the pace never flagged, which is important when cars are flying out of buildings.

If I was a blurbmeister I’d call Furious 7 the high octane movie of the summer, except in came out in early spring.  Never the less, it delivers what you paid your money for.  It is destined to be the biggest hit in cinema history, at least until Age of Ultron debuts next week.