Furious 7 review

                 Longtime collaborator, Justin Lin, who has been directing the “Fast and the Furious” films since cult-favorite “Tokyo Drift” back in 2006, has stepped aside to let “The Conjuring” and “Insidious” director James Wan take the wheel, and what’s both impressive and disappointing about this sequel is that, given the tonal disparity between these directors, the transition is pretty seamless.  Considering Lin’s success in reviving this once dwindling franchise, Wan locks in-step with Lin’s previous vision and continues to up the visual and conceptual ante.

                 If you stuck around after the credits of “Fast & Furious 6” you would have known that action-schlock extraordinaire Jason Statham would play heavily in this installment. Remember the villain of the last film, or maybe the one before that? It’s okay, nobody does. All you need to know is that Jason Statham plays his brother Deckard Shaw, and he’s pissed. After hospitalizing detective Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) he then goes after Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and his crew (Paul Walker, Tyrese Gibson, Ludacris). In the middle of this personal battle, the FBI, headed by a smarmy Kurt Russell, drops in to make sure Shaw doesn’t access a super-Snowden NSA chip called the Gods-eye. Also, Toretto’s gal Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) is having some existential issues, having once been brainwashed and memory wiped through at least two sequels.

                These movies have become so dumb and so transparently disinterested in emotional or physical reality that they have now transcended middling action-camp and settled into post-ironic sincere spectacle. Besides some distracting product placement, there isn’t an overwhelming sense of cynicism or muffled shame in doing exactly what it advertises to do, which is execute extended and elaborate set-pieces that could never take place in any universe we live in by actual human beings. Thank god cinema exists so that I can see a scene where cars are dropped from airplanes and parachuted directly into a high-speed vehicular shootout. “Furious 7” also blesses us with a scene where Vin Diesel crashes through the windows of the three separate Eithad Towers in Abu Dhabi, catching roughly two hundred feet of air between them.

                The problem with throwing out naturalism and the laws of physics completely is that the stakes are lowered to the point of near-disinterest. When characters can jump out of twelve story buildings and land face up on the top of a car or drive off of and roll down jagged cliffs and walk away alive, the threshold for suspense is extended. Every character in this film should have died at least three times each and even as they tirelessly wale on each other, when brutally fist fighting, it doesn't seem to matter how hard they hit or where they on the body they take a shot.

                However, after all the exploding is done, the most human moment of the film comes in the last five minutes, when the cast gives Paul Walker, who died tragically during the filming of this production, a loving tribute and farewell to his character Brian O’Connor. Of course it was necessary to write him out in order continue the series without him, but it was also done from a place of real grief and warmth. I can’t say that outside of the knowledge of Walker’s real death this moment is entirely earned, but it’s touching nonetheless.

                Never mind how stupid or inane the ‘plot’ might be or how cheesy the dialogue is or how lazy some of these camera-winking performances occasionally are, these movies celebrate the pure joy cinema as a showcase for action mechanics. In a time where Comic Con culture seems rules the genre, it’s refreshing to see a franchise that recalls the testosterone driven films of 80s and 90s, now with a large, multi-ethnic cast, even as these films are becoming increasingly interchangeable.

Grade: C+

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/April-2015