Furious 7

Almost all movies require the audience to throw logic out the window in some way, shape or form.  That's what makes movies fun to watch.  Furious 7, the latest in the long-running The Fast and the Furious franchise, is so illogical it borders on stupidity.  It features cars doing things cars can't do, being driven by people doing things that people can't do.  If I must be honest, the movie is well made, with good special effects.  But by about the one hour mark, I realized that all I had been watching were well done special effects, and that the movie wasn't going to try to make me care about anything else.

Before I go much further, let's address the elephant in the room - Namely the film's star, Paul Walker, and how the movie handles the fact that he died in the middle of shooting in November 2013.  The film is surprisingly respectful in how it handles the situation.  Using a combination of filmed footage, CG, and a body double (who is actually Walker's brother), the movie creates a surprisingly believable illusion that the actor was there throughout the entire film.  Yeah, there are a couple moments where you can tell that they are using the stand-in, but the CG and use of a body double are amazingly smooth, and never seem awkward.  The movie even gives Walker's character a nice little sentimental send off at the end, which might put a lump in the throat of those who follow the series.  It's probably the best way the filmmakers could have handled the difficult unexpected situation they were given, and I commend them.

Now let's talk about the movie itself, and good gravy, where do I even begin?  Apparently no longer content to just have cars driving recklessly down the streets at insane speed, in this movie, we gets cars skydiving out of airplanes, leaping in-between high-rise buildings, flying off of cliffs, and even intercepting an attack helicopter that some terrorists are using to attack the streets of L.A.  Naturally, the people behind the wheels of these cars are never once shown hurt or even showing physical pain.  In one scene, one of the main characters, Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) drives his car off a cliff in order to escape some gunmen.  We see the car flip and smash all the way down the side of a cliff, and land in a crushed heap at the bottom.  And yet, both Dominic and his passenger step out of the vehicle, not the slightest bit rattled or injured.  In a later scene, Dominic is struck in the face with a metal pipe during a fight, and he immediately gets right back up without missing a beat.

Am I missing something here?  Unless Dominic has somehow been replaced with an indestructible cyborg replica between sequels, this should not be happening.  I know that in a lot of action movies, the heroes usually seem invincible or incredibly lucky, but this movie takes it to ridiculous extremes.  The heroes here get in gunfights, kung fu fights, flip their cars over a couple dozen times, and throw their bodies off of high ledges, and the very next scene, they're posing on a beach like models in a music video.  In fact, there are a lot of scenes in this movie that seem to exist to simply show off how attractive its cast is.  Outside of the action scenes, the actors are required to do as little as possible.  They recite the bare minimum of dialogue to set up the next ludicrous set piece, pose and show off their bodies, and then climb inside their next vehicle that probably won't survive the upcoming action sequence.

If I haven't talked about the plot yet, that's because it doesn't matter.  The bad guy this time around is Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham), who is the older brother of one of the villains Dominic and his gang of hot rod outlaws defeated in an earlier movie.  Deckard wants revenge, though his exact means for revenge are unclear.  He simply shows up without warning, shoots at the heroes, then disappears.  He does this throughout the movie, until it is time for his final showdown with Dominic.  In a subplot, Dominic is approached by a government agent who calls himself Mr. Nobody (Kurt Russell).  He wants Dominic's help in rescuing a pretty young computer hacker (Nathalie Emmanuel), who has a device that they can use to help track down Shaw.  But wait a minute, since Shaw keeps on showing up wherever Dominic and his pals happen to be (Abu Dhabi, Tokyo, L.A.), why do they need the device to track him down in the first place? 

Whenever an action movie emphasizes action and special effects over being coherent, I usually find myself comparing the film to a mindless video game.  Not so here.  Furious 7 doesn't so much resemble a video game, as it does a movie trailer that runs for almost two and a half hours.  You could take any two minutes out of this movie, and make a trailer out of it.  The film is constructed entirely out of major action scenes that have been edited with such rapid precision by director James Wan (The Conjuring), it's almost too fast for the mind to comprehend.  I'm used to action movies being edited to the point that we only get a brief glimpse of what's going on, and while this isn't the worst editing I have seen (that honor still belongs to 2013's Getaway with Ethan Hawke), it still seems overstuffed.  But then, this is a movie that manages to throw a break in at a penthouse, a martial arts catfight, and a car driving through three different buildings all in one sequence.  Overstuffed is kind of an understatement when it comes to this.

There's no doubt in my mind that Furious 7 will be a smash at the box office.  It already has a built in audience, and there will be the people who will be curious to see Paul Walker's last starring role.  And you know what?  I think those people will get what they're looking for.  This movie wasn't made for me.  I realize that.  This was made for the loyal fans who have stuck with this series for so long.  They most likely won't mind the fact that the action sequences make your average superhero movie seem plausible, or the fact that there's little to no plot.  They'll just want to see the fast cars doing crazy stuff, and the attractive actors.  If that's all you want from this movie, you'll enjoy this.  This review is being written from the point of view of someone who has seen the entire series, has even enjoyed some of the entries, but overall never really has gotten fully behind it.  If you want to read a review from a fan (which you're sure to agree with more), there's probably a dozen of them on the Internet.  You'll probably agree with them, too.

Furious 7 is a movie that wants you to check your brain at the door, but I think it asks to check more of your brain than I was willing to give up to enjoy it.  I've been able to enjoy many ludicrous and silly action films, but this one kept me at a distance.  I found this movie too stupid to be fun, but I can also see it being a guilty pleasure for someone else. 

See the movie times in your area or buy the DVD at Amazon.com!

0 comments