After the events of the previous movie, the Fast Family are now themselves targets. Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham), brother of Owen (the villain of the previous movie), wants vengeance. He has already injured Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) and killed Han (Sung Kang).
Intent on turning the tables on this new antagonist, Dom (Vin Diesel) teams up with a mysterious government agent, 'Nobody' (Kurt Russell), to locate a device that is capable of locating Shaw. He just needs to find the hacker who invented (and hid) it.
Will he get to this mysterious individual before Shaw kills another member of the Family?
My mum is a big Jason Statham fan. She has watched most of his movies, and regularly goes to watch the new ones at the cinema. Mum generally does not have time or interest in movies, but the Stath is in one, she will be heading to the theatre.
I remember watching the mid-credit scene at the end of Fast 6 with my brother and when Statham was revealed as Han's killer, we shouted at Mum to come in and watch. We re-wound the scene and when he popped on screen Mum cracked the biggest smile.
Cut to two years later and Furious 7 has turned into a rare family trip to the flicks.
To quote the poster from the last movie, all roads lead to this. If Fast Five was the F&F series reaching maturity, Furious 7 is the breakout. The franchise was a legitimated as a genuine contender, racing to over a 1.5 billion at the global box office.
At the time, the reaction to Furious 7 seemed couched in the feelings around Paul Walker’s death. 6-ish years later, the seeds of the franchise’s decline seem all too evident.
At the time I remember being conscious of a rougher sense of style, and an overburdened plot. I also felt a sense of fatigue during the film’s extended third act.
For this re-watch, I was not able to catch this one on the big screen. There were some parts where I was half-watching - and I do not think it was just because I was on my laptop.
On this re-watch, the movie feels like two halves - one half a revenge thriller centred on Dom and Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham); the other, a 90s-style techno-thriller filled with increasingly ludicrous action sequences and a one-dimensional bad guy.
The back half of Fast & Furious 6 was a joy of OTT action and melodrama - the first half of Furious 7 feels like a continuation of that tone, but as with all heightening, its charms start to wear thin as the action heads towards the final showdown.
While the effects of offscreen tragedy probably played some part, the big problem with Furious 7 is that it is not exactly the movie it promises at the outset. The movie opens with a hilariously OTT entrance for Statham as he leaves his brother’s hospital room, and follows with the first set piece, as Shaw shows up in Hobb’s office.
There is a no-nonsense brevity to these scenes that works for Statham’s limited palette, a cinematic bluntness that matches the actor’s own lack of nuance. That bluntness has been a great source for irony (The Transporter, Crank and Spy), but here the filmmakers try to strip that out and turn Statham into a Terminator-style killer. While there is something funny about Shaw’s post-rampage stroll through the hospital, the character is pretty humourless in the rest of the movie. He is also not in the movie for long stretches, which speaks to the film’s overall lack of focus.
In the last couple movies, I approved of the film’s expansive ensemble, as it reduced the focus on the lead performers. But as the movies have progressed, that ensemble has become fixed in place, and it feels like each movie has to find ways to give everyone something to do.
There is so much going on in this movie, and I enjoyed the lion’s share of subplots, but the movie is so long that it gets increasingly hard to track what to care about. The film is so stuffed that I forgot that martial arts superstar Tony Jaa was in it. He shows up in a couple of great set pieces, but by the time he has his final showdown with Brian, I had forgotten he was in the movie.
The busy plot reminded of some of the Bond movies - the filmmakers have created a plot that is naturally small and intimate, but in order to maintain the formula, they have created another ‘mission’ thread to bring the movie in line with its predecessor, and provide moments for the ensemble.
The subplot of the ’God’s Eye’ device feels like another movie, with a more globe-trotting tone. Franchise scribe Chris Morgan tries to combine the two narratives, by having Shaw team up with the evil supervillain (a ridiculously underused Djimon Hounsou). The problem is that the characters are never really shown working together, and if we had not been told, it still feels like two separate plot-lines that occasionally bump into each other.
This franchise has never been great with villains, and Furious 7 does no better - Shaw has no real personality, and he does not take part in enough of the action. He does jeopardise some of the team’s missions, but there is a creative barrier around Dominic Toretto that means we never get a genuine sense that our burly hero is in real trouble.
I was a fan of Vin Diesel in the original movie - and even as far back as Fast & Furious, it felt like he was energised and keyed into the material. In Fast Five and Fast & Furious 6, I could not get over the feeling that he was cashing checks. He has figured out how to reduce his performance to the bare minimum, and I felt a sense of disinterest bleeding across the last two entries.
I am also coming around to the idea that - despite his persona - Diesel does not feel like the hard man that he wants Toretto to be. Diesel is capable of being charismatic, but his natural forte is not to stand and deliver ala Chuck Bronson. There are actors who can get away with that - Diesel is not one of those performers.
I wish he would lose his pretensions of machismo - he is more compelling when he shows some vulnerability. There is a nice little moment where we get a glimpse of that - as they head up to the party in the elevator, Dom mumbles to Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) that he feels a little ridiculous in a suit. Diesel even throws in a nervy little chuckle. In the middle of this movie, it felt like a bolt of energy.
The shift from the key trio to an ensemble was a blessing for this movie, allowing them to weave Paul Walker’s Brian O’Connor throughout the movie. The CG is starting to show its age, and there are some obvious matte lines in some of the repurposed scenes, but overall it still succeeds.
The ending does not quite pack the emotional wallop it had in 2015, but I still admire how subtle Brian/Walker’s send-off is. For a movie that includes a car jumping between three buildings, that is saying something.
While I am always happy to see Kurt Russell in anything, his character Mr Nobody is essentially this movie’s deus ex machina. Watching his scenes now, I was reminded of Russell Crowe’s appearance in The Mummy. The world-building in the previous movies felt organic - this feels more intentional, and less fun.
Likewise with the move to an international playground. It is cool, but it felt like we crossed that barrier fairly naturally in Fast & Furious 6 without the need to create a secret organisation that can facilitate the Family’s every need. After six movies, it almost feels like a betrayal - it sounds more exciting to me if Dom and his crew had to use their understanding of cars and their various underground contacts around the world to fight more technologically advanced nemeses like Shaw and Hounsou’s Mose Jakande.
As far as the action goes, I cannot fault most of it. The rescue of Ramsey (Nathalie Emmanuel) is fantastic, particularly Brian’s climatic escape from the falling truck. Featuring (mostly) real stunt-work and great sound design, it is pretty nerve-shredding.
While the action is OTT throughout, I did appreciate how the filmmakers did try to bring in some sense of verisimilitude to give the scenes some visceral impact. There are a couple of scenes where the soundtrack is replaced by diegetic sound, so all we hear is squealing tyres and wind. It is a neat choice although I do not think it works nearly as well as they want it to.
Fundamentally this movie is a cartoon, but there is a whimsy missing. Justin Lin had a great facility for juggling tone, and shooting action in extended wides so that the ridiculous stunts had greater impact. The filmmaking here is more obviously stylised, including jump-cuts, speed-ramping and rotating camera-work during combat scenes. It does not quite come off. The film is credited to six editors, and it does feel noticeably less slick and more choppy than the previous movie. Part of the problem is that performers like Statham and Jaa can actually perform stunts, but the filmmakers cut up their action across multiple angles in such a way that the thrill of their actions is somewhat lessened. In terms of over-cutting it is not as bad as Quantum of Solace or xXx 3, but there is a baffling fumbling of timing on the cuts that works against the fight scenes in the movie.
Bigger and sloppier than its predecessors, Furious 7 is another turning point for the franchise. Now the series was in the billion-dollar club. The template, previously so welcome to change and evolution, now feels fixed in place. While enjoyable in parts, by the end I needed a break. For the first time in a few entries, I am a little unenthused about what comes next.
If Furious 7 felt over-stuffed, how will F8 feel? Catch you next week...
No comments:
Post a Comment