“Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.” – Polonius, Hamlet, Scene 2 Act 2
The seventh entry in the meat ‘n’ metal saga that is Fast & Furious ups the silliness, downs the dialogue, and produces what is sure to be one of the most ridiculously entertaining movies of the year. Mad Max is going to have a hell of a time crossing the line as 2015’s best car movie after this.
This time around, Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and his crew are threatened by the vengeful brother of the villain from the previous movie and need to find a Macguffiny piece of tracking technology allowing them to get the drop on him before he kills again. That’s it. The entire plot. The Fast & Furious movies have always been exceptional on the road, but tend to stall once the dialogue kicks in. Furious 7 keeps the pontificating to a minimum, piling on gargantuan set-pieces and escalating the Tom & Jerry lunacy, saving speeches about family for brief intermissions where the audience can catch their breath before starting all over again. It’s madness, but there’s method in it, and by golly, does it ever result in a thrilling ride.
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Furious 7
Director: James Wan
Rating: R
Release Date: April 3, 2015
Furious 7 sets out its tone from the very first scene, in which Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham) visits his comatose brother in hospital and leaves the place in a somewhat messier state than he found it. It’s joyfully silly and shows a total disregard for logic, captured in a bravura tracking shot by new director, James Wan, who proves a highly capable replacement for the outgoing Justin Lin. Give a moment’s thought to the movie and it falls apart in front of your eyes, yet there isn’t a single second in which everyone involved isn’t fully aware and steering into the idea, pounding viewers’ scepticism until they’ve no choice but to chill out and enjoy the ride. Even a piece of product placement brazen enough to make James Bond would baulk becomes funny by merit of how completely and knowingly shameless it is.
Once you accept its terms, it’s hard not to fall in love with its entertainment-before-logic approach. Cars fly between Abu Dhabi skyscrapers, take parachute jumps out of aeroplanes, go on off-road jaunts through forests down the side of an Azeri mountain, and much more besides. Statham shows up at virtually every encounter with no explanation of how or why, other than it being a lot more fun to have him there. Those lunkspolitation match-up battles the Expendables movies promised and failed to deliver? Here, you get Statham vs The Rock, Michelle Rodriguez vs Ronda Rousey, Paul Walker vs Tony Jaa (twice), Statham vs Vin Diesel, and The Rock vs, umm, a predator drone. Wan’s shakycam and rapidfire editing can be frustrating, but maintains enough coherence not to lose the geography or physical impact of the fights.
By this point, the main cast have been together long enough to share a chemistry which feels like a genuine friendship, adding sincerity to Toretto’s proclamations of his crew as family. He’s the same gravel-voiced, straight-faced man-sausage as always, but allows just enough self-effacing irony and warmth to peek through the facade to ably function as the centre of the Furious universe. Tyrese Gibson and Ludacris make some wonderfully silly comic relief double-act, while the disgracefully gorgeous Nathalie Emmanuel – given an Ursula Andress moment in a tiny bikini, because why not – adds snarky Brit girl charm to what is otherwise an stew boiling over with macho posturing – even, or perhaps especially, from Michelle Rodriguez.
The downside is that with such an expansive cast, several of them have to be sidelined, which means Jordana Brewster is left fretting at home, while Sung Kang’s Han is offed with barely a thought. Most tragic is the restriction of The Rock/Dwayne Johnson’s Detective Hobbs to little more than cameos at the very beginning and very end of the movie, especially since, as you’d expect, his barnstorming charisma and comic timing steal every one of the scenes in which he appears. Hobb’s heavily implied infatuation with Diesel’s Toretto continues apace, and were it not for the presence of his young daughter in an early hospital scene, you get the feeling the two would be getting down to some earth-shattering, jello-abusing, sweaty bro-love right then and there.
Of course, it’s impossible not to discuss the impact of Paul Walker’s tragic real-life death on the movie. I’ve never been especially complimentary towards Walker’s abilities as an actor in the past, having previously referred to his on-screen presence as an unusually attractive piece of cardboard, but he’s settled into the role comfortably enough to deliver an easy-going and likeable performance even in the few moments he’s not in a punch-up or looking stern from behind a steering wheel. His character remains the least lively of the main cast, but the subplot about needing to get Brian home to his real family is made more affecting by Walker’s passing, even if his scenes with Brewster are undercut by some dreadful, sub-telenovela standard scoring. Fortunately, it all comes together in the movie’s final scene, which functions as a heartful and moving farewell to the character and tribute to the actor, symbolised with surprising grace and delicacy in the closing shot. You wouldn’t expect a Fast & Furious movie to reduce people to tears, yet no fewer than three women around me were visibly weeping when the lights came up.
That poignancy adds just a little depth to a movie whose otherwise sole focus is loud, smashy entertainment, and I’m sure the eternally blockbuster-friendly Walker wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. Furious 7 is not without its flaws, coming in about ten minutes too long and with even the most astonishing action sequences a little too prolonged not to feel a little wearying by the end. Yet those sequences truly are astonishing, each sufficiently distinct in look and theme to avoid repetition and packed with ribald humour and jaw-droppingly insane stuntwork.
Those with a predisposition towards political correctness should turn their noses away now: Rodriguez’s Lettie is given as much depth as any other character, but the male gaze is at full strength here, albeit never quite sure whether the cars or the booty are more worthy of worship. You can almost hear Vin Diesel and Paul Walker’s trousers rending in a scene where they happen upon a rare supercar, and when Diesel lifts it up for Walker to take a more intimate look at its engine, you get the feeling this is the threesome the two of them have really been waiting for. Diesel’s two hands probably weren’t all that was holding the car up, if you know what I’m saying. It’s hard to get righteous when the movie’s so completely aware of its own absurdity, however, and while perhaps slightly more explicit, the T&A never feels quite as predatory or trashy as Michael Bay at his leering worst. Fast & Furious 7‘s sole aim is delivering a hyper-concentrated dose of blockbuster entertainment, at which it succeeds magnificently.