I haven't seen a Fast and the Furious movie since the first one.
It was in a tiny cinema in Truro, Cornwall with my two best friends, and if I recall, we were the only people in the entire audience.
I remember it being a semi-straight action story about an undercover cop busting a badass street racing crew by becoming a badass street racer himself. I remember seeing posters for the sequels roll by year after year, and assuming every one was basically the same.
I was not prepared for the wholly different monster that the Fast and Furious series has become in the last decade.
From the first scene, I realized it had clearly been a while since I'd seen a real action movie.
The villainous Deckard Shaw is introduced, musing about the concept of revenge from a hospital window where his brother lies broken from some previous encounter with Vin Diesel and his assembled crew. Now Vin Diesel's character does have a name, but when your real name is Vin Diesel, why bother? Upon leaving his reverie, we're treated to a slow motion walk-though as Shaw leaves the hospital, that he's apparently torn apart single-handedly, using nothing but cockney wit and hand held mines that produce explosions larger than C4. He slips into his fabulous Maserati, as the hospital collapses in the background, and declares his intent to tear apart the lives of our heroes.
From this point onward, I can honestly say the series lives up to its name. Vin Diesel and his crew, who are almost entirely new to me as a returning viewer, are an incredibly likable bunch of characters.
It's an easygoing beginning establishing the relative status-quo the characters have been living in since the last movie, with the old hero Brian starting a happy family, and Vin himself trying to rebuild his relationship with the ever sulking Letty, who at some point in the series appears to have lost her memory.
We see vignettes of every day life for these guys, with Brian playing with his son, or Vin taking his wife to a race competition in the desert to prove to her that her memory loss hasn't disable her driving skills. We're taught the cinematography style awfully quick in this scene, where you're either looking at intense close ups of bouncing bikini-clad behinds on soaking dancing girls, the shining curves of a supercar worth more than your house, or Vin Diesel giving a slow frown just off camera.
It all looks incredible, the camera work is amazing, and it's a close to mechanophilliac pornography as you could ever find in a mainstream cinema.
The film does not waste its time with exposition, however. As soon as we know what's up, just enough to get by, Shaw thunders into the setup, blowing up Vin's house (essentially making it look like any other in East LA) and broadcasting his dark warnings known to the crew.
This is the flow that the Expendables wanted to have so badly.
Within minutes, we're back in a tight revenge story, and then the story takes another left turn when a sharp suited G-Man played by Kurt Russel shows up to introduce a new subplot.
Soon enough, Vin and his whole crew are assembled to not only rescue a world class black-hat hacker from an extremist mercenary group, they have to steal state of the art cyber technology back, and use it to find and defeat the malevolent British Bastard who's blowing up their houses.
If you put the action side by side with the Expendables, by the time the crew are flying out the back of a plane over enemy territory in their supercars, we'd still be seeing Stallone and Rourke groan dialogue at each other like two half melted action men.
We're introduced to the most intense federal employee ever when Dwayne Johnson appears, playing the particular flavor of agent who doesn't play by the rules, wears a tiny muscle shirt to cover his massive bulging biceps, and wears a .50 caliber magnum on his hip, probably for dealing with all the stampeding rhinos in Los Angeles. Dwayne hams it up full force in this role, flexing, peacocking and dropping one liners that come straight out of an 80's Van Damme movie. It's like a look back at the old Rock again, and it's brilliant.
With the crew out on their cyber terrorism adventure, the film begins to follow a rhythm. Cobble together a plan, look damn fine doing it, bullets start flying, and then Shaw shows up out of the blue with a new gun or a better car and another huge fight starts. It's silly, the set-up and the plain insanity of the action are so huge that it just makes you angry and excited at the same time. We're introduced to more villains in the form of Shaw's new friends, Minibosses who come in Asian kung-fu fighting and African Mercenary flavors.
The notorious hacker the team rescue is quickly recruited, and when she turns out to be a gorgeous English girl, she becomes motivator for some of the films funniest dialogue as Ludacris and Tyreese Gibson squabble to impress her. The play between these two is actually great, and I was surprised at how good Ludacris was in the whole role.
After a wild ride of foreign affairs, hacking, and Michelle Rodriguez fighting Ronda Rousey in evening gowns (surely the second best thing we could watch the two of them do), everything comes back together in LA for the finale, where Vin and his crew plan to set a trap for Shaw and his men with some fascinatingly nonsensical technological requirements, involving a lot of tearing ass around surface streets in their cars. It's huge, it's crazy. They juggle so many characters and events in this sequence it's a recipe for a cinematic nightmare. With four different vehicles carrying seven different characters, some crossing between vehicles, evading an attack chopper and a super drone armed with rockets, a final climactic showdown between Vin and Shaw, on foot chases all held to a technobabble time limit, and still having time to have Dwayne Johnson bust out of hospital in a stolen ambulance wielding a minigun... you'd think you'd be watching a complete clusterfuck, but somehow, it all works flawlessly. There's no confusion, you know where everyone is, and you know whats going down in every scene. That shows an effort in screenwriting, direction, and editing that came together flawlessly.
It's very hard not to like Furious 7 in almost every way. It's a return to action in a powerful, energetic way. No one will be winning any awards, but the acting is tight, and it fits the feel. If I had to change anything, it would be to make the villains as fun and enjoyable as the heroes. As they are, they're stock. British special forces, African warlord, Asian-Non-Specific-Martial-Arts. I'd also have loved to see Michelle Rodriguez enjoy her character as the rest of the cast get to enjoy theirs. The subplot of her memory loss makes her maudlin and subdued in almost every scene, and I would have liked to have seen as much energy and wisecracking from her as the rest of the crew. She's a powerful female presence and there's a gap left with her being so quiet.
The film closes down on an inevitably poignant note. It's sad that a film so full of fun and playfulness had it's face changed by the tragic loss of its long time star, Paul Walker. The final scenes are a goodbye from the film's stars both in character and out. One last ride on an empty California highway forms the end of the film that Paul sadly never lived to see.
You don't have to have seen the last 6 to have a massive time seeing Furious 7. There's a reason this series has proven to be Universal's most profitable of all time. It's loud, it's exciting, it's heartfelt and the whole thing is a return to a time when action movies really needed nothing more than just that.
