Furious 7
Grade: C-
Starring: Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Jason Statham, Michelle
Rodriguez, Tyrese Gibson, Chris “Ludacris” Bridges, Kurt Russell, Dwayne
Johnson and Jordanna Brewster; with Nathalie Emmanuel as Ramsey
Featuring Appearances By: Djimon Hounsou, Elsa Pataky, Lucas
Black, Tony Jaa, Ronda Rousey, Luke Evans, Sung Kang and Gal Gadot
Premise: The deadly, special-ops trained older brother of
the now-crippled Owen Shaw declares a one-man war on Dominic Toretto and his
gang. After Dom and his family are nearly killed by a bomb and one of their
friends is killed overseas, Dom and the gang seek revenge.
Rated PG-13 for constant intense, destructive action
violence, some language, and innuendo
First and foremost, I will say that Furious 7—the sixth sequel to 2001’s The Fast and the Furious—does pay a very nice little tribute to
deceased star Paul Walker, who died on November 30, 2013, in a car accident
when this movie was about half-finished. The accident was actually not related
to the making of the movie, but the actor starred in five of the aforementioned
predecessors to this movie, including the original, so I knew it would pay tribute to
him, and I was prepared to wait all the way through the credits if I had to in
order to see the tribute. I didn’t have to, because the movie is about five
extra minutes long in order to squeeze in a last little scene with his
character, former FBI agent Brian O’Conner, plus a montage of clips from all
the movies. And, as the camera lifts away from the action for the final time
before the credits, two words arise onscreen: FOR PAUL. It’s a nice touch, and, without a doubt, the finest
moment in the movie.
I mean that last thought genuinely, but what’s also inferred
there is: Furious 7 is a mess--a
frenetic ADD exercise that throws in everything including the kitchen sink as
it veers from lazy to aggressively stupid over a two-and-a-quarter-hour running
time. Oh, there’s certainly a high-octane, heart-pounding, edgy, super
entertaining spectacle in there (it’s not exactly hard to see it), but, Furious 7 drowns in a sea of lazy
plotting, poor dialogue, pretty poor acting, a complete suspension of logic,
physics, and rules of any kind, way too many unintentionally-funny moments, and
wanton self-contradiction. Maybe I shouldn’t have expected better, but the
first movie (which actually had *gasp* some subtlety and depth) is a classic,
the second (2003’s 2Fast, 2Furious)
wasn’t bad and even 2011’s Fast Five—the
first installment that brought Dwayne Johnson on board—was ridiculously entertaining.
However, the baloney meter starting reaching maximum levels with 2013’s
ludicrous (not LudAcris, har har har) Fast 6,
and it’s obviously still going.
Again, I shouldn’t have expected any different, but a good
98 percent of Furious 7 simply exists
in order to make fanboys make excited/awed variations on the phrase “Oh SNAP!!”
Plot
**previous knowledge of the series is recommended before
viewing, though I would say only Fast 6 is
absolutely necessary at this point**
This synopsis could go on for a while, so I’ll cut to the
chase: former SAS-trained agent Owen Shaw (Luke Evans) didn’t die at the end of
Fast 6, but he was crippled. Turns
out, this development didn’t sit well with his older brother,
super-highly-trained special-ops rogue Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham), who vows
revenge on the gang of culprits. First, he attacks and nearly kills a pair of
government agents (Dwayne Johnson and Elsa Pataky) while stealing intel on the
culprits. Then he makes his way to Tokyo
and manages to kill Han (Sung Kang), who had left the group broken-hearted
after his lover Giselle (Gal Gadot) died in the attempt to kill Owen Shaw. Shortly
after killing Han, Deckard detonates an explosive that was somehow (!!!!)
placed in the suburban Los Angeles house where mechanic/racing kingpin Dominic
Toretto (Vin Diesel) lives with his sister, Mia (Jordanna Brewster), her
husband Bryan (the late Walker), and their young son. They aren’t hurt by the
explosion because they were all outside, but they’re understandably shaken, and
Dom is enraged that his family was targeted.
Deckard soon makes his way to LA and finds and nearly kills
Dom before the highly-armed minions of a mysterious government operative (Kurt
Russell) interfere. Deckard escapes, but the operative offers his and his
team’s help and resources in helping Dom chase Deckard down if Dom and his proven team of
high-falutin’ risk-takers will help him recover the architect of a precious
surveillance gadget. The architect, Ramsey (Nathalie Emmanuel of Game of Thrones), has been kidnapped by
a gang of nasty Middle-Eastern terrorists (led by Djimon Hounsou, wearing the
same white goatee he sported in Guardians
of the Galaxy). Since the terrorists’ lair is in the mountains and
nigh-impregnable, Dom and his gang are needed to find some risky, over-the-top
stunt to get them in and get Ramsey out. So, Dom and Brian reunite with the
chatty Roman (Tyrese Gibson) and tech-whiz Tej (Chris “Ludacris” Bridges), plus
Dom’s some-time love interest, amnesia-addled Letty (Michelle Rodriguez), and
pull off an incredible stunt that nearly gets them all killed. But it turns out
Deckard Shaw is in league with the terrorists and Dom and his gang are soon
being pursued by an army, who have in their hands the incredible surveillance
device Ramsey invented—a device which makes it virtually impossible for them to
hide or disappear or make a clean escape. They’ll have to stand and fight.
What Works?
Again, the Walker
tribute was nice. Interestingly, since the movie was only half-finished when he
died, it’s noted that the producers used his brothers Caleb and Cody as
stand-ins/body doubles, and also used CGI in places, to finish his performance,
and I can honestly say you wouldn’t know it. It’s well done. Also, despite a
handful of cringe-worthy lines, the actor goes out well, without embarrassing
himself—and no doubt this movie will be a huge monetary success and will be
hailed by some as the best of the series, so it’s a solid final tribute. It’s
true that he started the series as a co-lead with Diesel and was later
overshadowed by the multi-ethnic ensemble the series built up, but his legacy will
always be tied to this series and this movie. This movie ensures he will be
missed.
Beyond the movie’s sentimental value, however, I confess that there
isn’t a whole lot that I loved. There are certainly worse movies—less
entertaining ones that have less to keep you watching—and even I couldn’t
resist some of the “oh SNAP” moments
I mentioned earlier. The one action sequence that really kept me watching is
the same one that was forecast in the trailer, in which the primary cast drive
cars out of an in-flight C-130, and then use parachutes to land on an
otherwise-inaccessible mountain road, and then enter into a high-speed chase
with the terrorists who are holding Ramsey. It’s a bit of a bummer this scene,
and its biggest stunt (which involves Walker), were already shown in the trailer, but
there are a few surprises and it’s still awesome, especially the moment in
which Dom uses the low-rider jack on his car to bounce the terrified woman
clinging to his hood into the air so he can snatch her through his open sunroof
while an armored car is trying to drive him off the road at the same time. I
think I actually clapped at that part, and I’m smiling thinking about it. That
was just clever enough, I guess, that my personal baloney-meter didn’t blow up,
though of course much of the scene was improbable.
Also—am I the only one person who enjoyed Kurt Russell the
most out of all the actors in this movie?
Probably glad to be cashing in with this series rather than the even
lamer (and much less-profitable) Expendables
series, the actor swaggers about and seems to enjoy himself at least as
much as any of the series regulars.
What Doesn’t Work?
For me, the problems in this series really started with the
last movie, Fast 6, even though you
could smell them coming long before that. And I’m not talking the regular
suspension-of-disbelief-required type of stuff all summer action movies have.
To give you an idea: in Fast 6’s
climactic action sequence, Gisele (who appears in Furious 7 only in a still photograph and clips from earlier
installments) supposedly died falling from a speeding car that was
elevated 6-8 feet in the air. In the same
movie, Vin Diesel’s Dom suffered nary a scratch when he crashed a speeding car
into a highway guard rail with the door open, in order to fling himself out, in
order to catch his dearly-beloved Letty, who had just been thrown from a
speeding tank; he caught her in midair and then landed, after a flight of probably
some 50-plus feet, on the hood/windshield of another car, with her on top of him. Thanks to his action,
she was fine, and, again, inexplicably,
he was, too…and yet a much lesser fall meant the end for a supporting character…?
Fast 6 suffered
other problems, too, of course—they never even showed the death of the main
villain, Owen Shaw (they only suggested he was dead after being flung from a
speeding car like Gisele was), only for them to apparently decide, at the
beginning of Furious 7, that he
didn’t die after all (when it was taken for granted in the last movie that he
did, thus bringing about the end of the
movie in which he was the chief villain).
Anyway, that was Fast
6. Here are just some of the things about Furious 7 that set my baloney-meter off:
- Owen Shaw didn’t die. He was only crippled (albeit bedridden-in-a-hospital-type crippled). His brother Deckard is in such a rage over this and cares so much about him that he goes overseas to multiple continents to try and kill the people who did it…rather then just staying with him to try and help him recover. Even after he fails in his first attempt to kill the people, knowing his brother is alive, he keeps trying to kill them rather then trying to be there for the brother he supposedly cares so much about.
- Similar to the aforementioned stunt in Fast 6—there’s part where a man is blasted out the window of a building by a grenade explosion and falls maybe five stories clutching a woman, who lands on top of him when he lands on top of an SUV, basically crushing it. The man is shown in the next scene in the hospital with a cast on one arm and one leg, sitting up making quips about hospital food. He’s apparently such a quick healer and so impervious to pain/damage, and yet, by the time of the movie’s climactic action sequence—probably a week or two later—he’s still in the hospital! If he was in such good shape and so unaffected by the blast, wouldn’t he have gotten out by then?
- When the movie no longer has need of a certain supporting character (because it’s time for the focus to shift wholly back to the main cast), it finds the most convenient way possible for him to leave the film without us asking too many questions.
- A man drives an ambulance off a highway overpass with such precision that he lands on a speeding weaponized drone in mid-flight and crushes it.
- The aforementioned drone can blow stuff up real good with its missiles and machine guns, but either misses or can barely damage the vehicles in which all the attractive main characters ride.
- Furious 7 makes the tortured/amnesiac/will-they-get-back-together romantic subplot with Vin Diesel and Michelle Rodriguez the beating heart of the movie, despite the fact that neither is a good-enough actor to really pull it off.
- A pregnant woman encourages her husband to go on a dangerous mission rather than stay home with her and their son.
- Tyrese Gibson, who’s so obviously this movie’s comic relief that he should have shown up in a funny costume, is funny only once every 100 or so times he tries to be.
- A man determined to kill an enemy decides that enemy’s as good as dead when he’s crushed by concrete blocks in the collapse of a parking garage. He decides/assumes he’s dead—this is a man he swore to heaven and earth he would kill for targeting his “family”, and yet he just assumes he’s dead rather than checking.
- The same enemy who was surely dead after being crushed by concrete blocks in the collapse of a parking garage is later shown alive and unscathed—without so much as a scratch, bruise, or limp—while heading to a prison cell.
- The head figure in a tight-knit family/gang seems horribly injured—even dead—after crashing a car nose-down after driving it off a building and landing upside down. A) He has a mere trickle of blood down the side of his face despite the fact that his car was crushed—remember, he’s obviously in such bad shape they think he’s dead. B) They all stand around misty-eyed or make hysterical attempts at CPR, rather than calling an ambulance for him.
- The police only show up in moments of high action when the movie needs to kill off, blow up, or crush some people (or their cars) who aren’t the main characters—who are obviously going to survive because they’re the main characters. I mean, why would the main characters die?
- The Ronda Rousey cameo: It only happened because Michelle Rodriguez’s knock-down, drag-out fisticuffs with another MMA star (Gina Carano) was such a literally smashing success in the last movie.
- The movie plucks another major antagonist (Thai action star Tony Jaa) out of thin air when the movie decides it needs another villain in a movie that already has Deckard Shaw and the head of the terrorist group Dom and his buddies swiped Ramsey from. That’s three major villains who all need to get killed off. Remember, this movie is a sequel to a movie about urban street racing.
Content
There’s a couple cuss words, and the movie never misses a
chance to leer up women’s short, short skirts
or tops, but Furious 7 is mostly
Furious because it ups the action/violence quotient by about 50. This movie is
wall-to-wall, almost non-stop fast-paced action and violence. Of course, there’s
very little blood no matter how dramatic things get (see #11 above). Probably not
recommended for young kids, but, then again, there’s always the chance they’ll
be lulled into a stupor by the sheer amount of inconsequential, noisy drama
going on. I was.
Bottom Line
This review probably won’t keep anybody from seeing Furious 7, but I wrote it anyway
^^. It contains a nice little tribute
montage to the late Paul Walker at the end, and there’s plenty of action (including
some actually really cool action), but, overall, I was not a fan. As I wrote above, I probably shouldn’t have been
surprised, but “Furious 7 drowns in a
sea of lazy plotting, poor dialogue, pretty poor acting, a complete suspension
of logic, physics, and rules of any kind, way too many unintentionally-funny
moments, and wanton self-contradiction.” Yeah. Lame.
Furious 7 (2015)
Directed by James Wan
Screenplay by Chris Morgan
Rated PG-13
Length: 137 minutes
