Movie Review: The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.

It's not often we get a good old fashioned cursed film these days. 

Probably no film of recent decades has had a production nightmare quite like Terry Gilliam's long suffering Don Quixote epic. It's taken the man 25 years to finally bring the Man of La Mancha to the big screen, and certainly if Gilliam were to look back at where he began his masterpiece, it would look quite different than what he somehow ended up with after all that time.

Toby is a young and hopeful American filmmaker touring Spain, seeking the perfect cast for his indie interpretation of Don Quixote. Finding the perfect rustic little Spanish village and choosing his cast from the folk that live there, Toby encounters Javier. An aged cobbler with a distinctive face, perfect for the title role. Javier is no actor, and a hopeless Don Quixote at first, but soon the joy of the role overtakes the man, and brings a taste of success to Toby and his little epic. 

A decade later, Toby is the golden child of big budget high fashion advertising, and shooting his latest commercial in the Spanish countryside. Realizing his proximity to the old shooting ground of his past, he escapes the hectic set in search of some inspiration from his former indie years. The old streets are the same, the people aging or passed away. When he unexpectedly runs into the ancient Javier, Toby discovers that the cobbler has been trapped living the true life of Don Quixote ever since.  

Recognizing his long lost squire 'Sancho' immediately, 'Don Quixote' drags the confused young director into the wilds of rural Spain, seeking monsters to battle, maidens to rescue, and the return of the lost age of Chivalry. Believe it or not, they find it.

While The Man Who Killed Don Quixote may take a while to get to the 'Gilliam-esque' elements of the tale, it's a wild ride when it does get there. The valiant knight and his hapless squire take a twisting road through their adventures, with startling changes in mood and style only a moment away at any turn. Set against an ever changing backdrop of the Spanish countryside, through windmill filled mountains, sleepy hamlets from the 14th century and medieval castles filled with carnival revelers, Don Quixote and young Sancho encounter the best and worst of humanity. The lines between what is real and dream, fantasy and reality, become hard to discern, and our hero's adventure soars through heights of slapstick comedy at one moment, to the depths of deep sadness the next. 

Just as Quixote himself is lost in his world of make believe chivalry, the tale forces us to peer through this lens alongside him. After a while the evil giants and cruel wizards of the dream places of La Mancha are more likable than the detestable individuals in the world of the real. Foreign investors flashing money and dropping slurs around the Spanish locals, womanizing businessmen and philandering wives, all number among the real world monsters, and soon enough even Toby begins to question why he would wish to return. 

Taking the expected weirdness of a Gilliam movie all aside, we are left with two really quite brilliant performances here. There's a multitude of characters crossing the paths of our heroes, but it truly is Quixote and Sancho themselves that absolutely shine. 

Adam Driver gives us a Toby that is so out of his depth in the world of the fearless Don Quixote, with a constant refusal to accept the realities of the impossible situations he is cast into in the role of Sancho Panza. He's the perfect straight man against the endlessly excitable Don Quixote, acting almost as a personified audience reaction at times, and his modern sanchismos are a joy throughout the adventure. 

Our titular hero, the chivalrous holy warrior Don Quixote, is so well portrayed by Gilliam legend Jonathan Pryce, with so much laughter and conviction and genuine love in his every delivery that he is a constant thrill to watch.

I am so in love with this playful, nuanced performance that I could watch Pryce's Don Quixote in ten more films. The labor of love in this sprawling tale is no more clear than in the heart shown by the Man of La Mancha himself. 

The production of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote may indeed have been cursed, but what has arrived is a film that is wide in scope and grand in nature. It has the tenuous grasp on the real that we expect from Terry Gilliam, but is stood on more solid ground than you might at first expect, with touching moments, and perhaps an element of reflection from the mind of filmmaker looking back on what he started with so long ago.

Movie Review: Logan.

There is something about the X-Men, be it the stories, the villains, the mature concepts and themes, that holds a special place in the heart for my generation more than most any other pop culture property. The scrappy, rough and tumble anti-hero Wolverine is one of the most persistently popular comic book characters of all time.

He's the favorite of millions, and his movie portrayal is one of the most beloved of any comic book character ever brought to the screen. Hugh Jackman's seemingly constant joy at playing the character has come through as enjoyable time after time, even if the films he's featured in have gone from great, to bad, to worse and back again in the last 20 years. When last year's Deadpool took the comic book movie, made it R-Rated, and walked away with the highest R-Rated opening week of all time, it was only a matter of time before the comic book names we really know took notice.

Logan is different in many respects from it's predecessors, but not different enough that it doesn't fit.
This film is the epilogue. The standing final chapter in the years and years that have passed since the goofy good vs evil of the X-Men's first cinematic outing. Logan is what happens after the spandex comes off, when all the old villains have been defeated, and the heroes have to live out their days. It's a film with a powerful reminder of mortality. Everyone, even superheroes, will grow old, and inevitably, no matter your heroism, everyone goes back to the dirt in the end.

Logan is a broken man, his seemingly timeless body suddenly aging, and his regenerative mutant powers becoming weaker day by day. The once infamous Wolverine is slowly being poisoned to death by the very adamantium that makes him so indestructible, reduced to working as a limo driver near the immense, nationally guarded US/Mexico border. There have been no new mutants born in over two decades, a dying breed swiftly becoming extinct.

Every penny he gets, Logan returns south of the border to bring to his last surviving allies, the malformed Caliban, and the feeble-minded shell of the man that was once Charles Xavier. Charles is kept locked away by his friends in a storage tanker to protect the world from the seizures that wrack his addled mind, his once incredible psychic powers now a dangerous uncontrollable side effect of a degenerative brain disease. Scraping together enough to keep Charles in his medication, and saving for the day when one day they can escape and leave the western world behind, is all that consumes the life of old man Logan.

However, a glimmer of the past greatness of Professor X remains, and in his moments of lucidity, Charles hears the whispers of  a new generation, the echoes of young mutant minds somewhere out there, crying out in need. When Wolverine is approached by a mysterious woman desperately seeking aid, he realizes that it may be time once again to take up the unwanted mantle of the Wolverine, and be the hero this broken future needs one last time.

Logan is a believable, awfully close-to-home future dystopia. Set in the year 2029, it shows so many echoes of reality that it can be a touch disturbing at time. The excesses of the wealthy so close to extreme poverty, cultural oppression verging on genocide, deportation and the promise of a better world out beyond the border are all events we see the ancestors of in the news as we speak.

This dark and truly adult film shines brightest in the main characters, and there are some performances here that are an absolute joy to behold. The aging titular hero and his mentor form a duo here that is probably better played than ever before. Logan is an honest, lovable, yet tremendously flawed hero, nuanced and complex. Patrick Stewart returns to the series to play the absolutely gripping, heartbreaking side of Charles Xavier we never thought we'd see. New protagonist Laura, the fulcrum of the film's plot, is one of the best child performances I've seen in years, her unfortunate character equal parts fun, frightening, and very moving. New faces, like the albino mutant tracker Caliban, and the villainous G-man Donald Pierce, fade a little into the background in comparison to the brilliant main characters, but there are no bad performances to be found.

The film does not shy away from using it's R rating thoroughly, be warned. You're not taking your kids to watch Logan leap around in spandex fighting Magneto this time. Logan rips through people with a glorious, shockingly graphic abandon here. In my viewing the audience was audibly shocked to gasping during the first fight scene. It is brutal, it is bloody, and it does not hold back. The very concepts of the movie itself are also of a more mature tone than you'd normally find in superhero properties as well. Real world themes of discrimination, child abuse, and persecution of the underclasses are all dealt with here. Also getting to hear Professor X say 'fuck' is a moment we've all been waiting for without knowing it.

If there's anything Logan lacked, in my opinion, it was a strong villain. With a hero as grand as the Wolverine, you need someone for him to go up against that matches him for strength as well as personality, and the latter was severely lacking here. It's a new story, only tenuously connected to previous entries in the X-Men franchise, but the big part of me that was aware it's the last one, really wanted to see a final showdown between Wolverine and his timeless nemesis, Sabretooth.

Logan might not even really be considered a superhero movie. It's a dystopian road movie, closer to the likes of Mad Max or Book of Eli than to X-Men. It's dark, and might be unforgivably so for some viewers. Part of the charm of comic book heroes is, they stay the same heroic age forever. We don't want to see our heroes get old, it feels too real. Logan will take your previous impressions of the X-Men characters and take them places they have never been before, and if you can handle it, it's one of the best films the genre has ever produced.

Movie Review: Fantastic Four.

I have never been a big fan of the Fantastic Four.
In my opinion, they're the product of an older era of the superhero concept, one that has moved on in leaps and bounds in the sixty-odd years since the original Marvel team first appeared. They've tried to give a fresh spin to the familiar characters of Mr Fantastic, Johnny and Sue Storm, and The Thing so many times you would think they'd be unrecognizable, but nothing ever really seems to change with these guys.

The same seems to be true every time they cross to a new media. Sure, they had a popular cartoon in the 90's, but no one liked it as much as the X-Men cartoon, and the last two Fantastic Four film adaptations were coughed up among other, more successful comic movies and were swiftly forgotten. Did we really need another reboot of the team that just keeps getting left behind?

For the first hour of the brand new, imaginatively titled 'Fantastic Four', you could have fooled me that we did. We follow the misadventures of a young Reed Richards, a genius scientific prodigy building his teleportation device in his father's garage with the help of his friend Ben, and it's good cinema all the way. We watch their friendship grow as they work on Reed's device in his high school science fair, and then be tested as Reed is recruited by the project head of a secret government test site to finish ironing out the kinks in their grand design.

All this is good stuff. The character work is strong, the acting is enjoyable. The characters aren't a far stretch from what we know and expect. The project lead's two children, the frosty and detail oriented Sue Storm, and her cocky street racing brother Johnny, join Reed on his development of the teleportation device that will save mankind from itself. Also working on the project is the foreign wild-card Victor Von Doom, an outspoken youth with just as much genius as Reed, but dangerous personality quirks. At least, this is what we're told about Victor, from the point of view of the government suit who takes the role of the film's villain through 90% of the runtime.

The Victor we actually see isn't all that bad at all. He's just a confident, unforgiving young man who considers the ruling cliche of America unacceptable. Which isn't villainous at all, considering the proof we see of the nefarious intentions of these same government characters.

Together, the soon to become Fantastic foursome and Victor perfect the project, and in a twist of drunken college intent, decide to send themselves through the teleporter before some astronaut can take all the glory. Instead of it being the four we expect who get to travel to the alternate world, however,  they leave Sue Storm behind and drag along Ben Grimm, which seemed not particularly sensible, but friendship IS magic after all.

The excursion doesn't go as planned, and while Sue watches helplessly from her monitors back on Earth, Victor plunges his hand into a pool of living energy and sets off an earthquake that threatens to kill them all. Reed, Johnny and Grimm are thrown back through the teleporter (each with fitting and appropriate twists and malfunctions that decide their powers) and back to Earth to face the results of their mistake.

We see a glimpse of them afterwards, the four just beginning to show signs of their powers, before we are treated to the screen that, in my opinion, completely ruined the movie. A fade to black with the words: 1 year later.

Instead of following the characters we've seen for the whole film, and watch them experience their new powers, with all the joy and horror that would come with it, the film just skips it all entirely to take us to a future where they have already all mastered their abilities. We don't get to see Johnny Storm realize he can fly and throw fireballs, we don't get to see Sue learn to control her invisibility or develop her force fields, we don't get a single scene with poor old Ben Grimm realizing what he has become as he looks down at himself. All the character development up to this point is essentially wasted, and what should have been the most dramatic, intense part of the movie, is skipped completely.

From here, the film takes a roller coaster spiral downwards into the finale. No time is wasted on characters anymore, it's just government conspiracy and half-hearted arguments between the characters we don't really know anymore.

The finale rushes in like a truck, and after a second attempt to send travelers to the alternate world, Victor is back on the scene and becomes the movie's instant villain, with little to no real reason or drive. He's back, he wants to destroy everything, and the Fantastic Four must stop him.

The problem here is that we haven't seen these characters grow together, we haven't seen moments of reprieve from the training, or scenes of friendship or the characters just being themselves. From what we gather from the choppy sequences post time skip, they've barely even seen each other in a year. This doesn't feel like a team at all, as much as four characters who're just conveniently together in time to fight the bad guy. Which they do, and in under five minutes have defeated and saved the world.

The whole thing is over so fast and so effortlessly that Doom feels entirely like an afterthought instead of the great villain he's meant to be. The final battle is almost a joke, it's over so quick, not to mention they actually have a moment where Reed stretches out one of his arms to box Doom in the face, complete with comedy elastic noise, and expect us still to be taking the fight seriously.

It all started out so good, and it's such a shame that after the first act, the film just became a trial in the expected. There's no dynamic between our heroes, which is incredibly noticeable in the awkward scenes between Reed and Ben towards the end of the film, and there's not even any effort to develop the heavily hinted at love triangle with Reed/Sue/Doom that should have been so important. With its short run time, it seems to be missing its entire second act altogether.

The worst part is, for a superhero team that above all else and all others is about family, friendship and being close with one another, the Fantastic Four feels like less of a team than any other superhero movie I've ever seen. By the finale they seem to have no real connection, no genuine friendships, and the scene where they are meant to be taking friendly shots at each other just feels like they are being intentionally cruel to one another.

If the film could have continued with the fun and cleverness that it started with, there would be something here. What we have here instead, is a film that will be doing a very fine Invisible Woman impression at the box office.

Movie Review: Dude Bro Party Massacre 3.

I saw a film last week. I saw it in a quiet little theater after hours during San Diego Comic-con. It had the aura of going to some banned piece of cinema, no posters on the walls, just a few eager filmmakers and a lot of t shirts with exploding heads on them.
I was going to see Dude Bro Party Massacre 3, and I was not disappointed.

What unfolded on the screen before me was the most brilliant homage to the slasher horror genre of the 1980's you'll find out there today. It's inexcusably violent, unapologetically crude, and a huge amount of fun.

We're introduced to the blood soaked world of Dude Bro Party Massacre through a mile-a-minute recap of the previous (Non-existent) films in the series. Where we learn the terrible origins of serial killer Motherface, and how she has terrorized the beer swilling souls of the local fraternity, Delta Bi Theta, for years with grisly murders and truly terrible one liners. All presented stylishly in glorious 80's quality film, complete with fake commercials and tracking errors.

Now, at the dawn of Dude Bro Party Massacre 3, the identical twin brother of a previous victim of Motherface's rampage must infiltrate the frat house to find his brother's killer, and finally end the terror of Motherface. What follows is the most enjoyably silly take on the slasher genre you could hope for, complete with shirt ripping, dramatic monologues, nude tai-chi, and some wickedly funny dialogue. 

The true fun here is in the personalities. The filmmakers themselves fill out the roster of drunken louts that make up the frat house, and they're a lovable lot to watch on screen. Among the most memorable are Turbeaux, a high-energy freak played with a Jack Black-like zeal who beats pledges and is terrified of puppies, and Nedry, the wheelchair bound nerd who can't catch a break.

As the frat party head off to the lakeside house to inevitably get murdered, we also have a sub plot of a pair of police officers investigating the case, in their own special way. Officer Sminkle is a barely capable but kind hearted moron just about kept in line by the exasperated but eager-to-prove-herself officer Buttiker. These two are a great double act, give us just enough of a break from the frat storyline when needed, and Officer Sminkle just has some of the film's funniest lines. Appearing as the Police Chief is Patton Oswalt, and the smattering of celebrity is used perfectly, with just a perfectly fitting role and none of the ass kissing usually aimed at celebrities in smaller budget productions.

In short, Dude Bro Party Massacre 3 is exactly what you could want from it. It'll be your new guilty pleasure, your new party movie. A gory, offensive, foot stompingly funny time full of murders and unfortunate pledges and well-timed celebrity cameos. A mix of Kids in the Hall style comedy and Troma class gross out violence, with a surprising amount of heart. Most importantly, it feels like the filmmakers had fun making it, and that fun shows through in every scene. Just sit back and enjoy it, and join in the eternal speculation, what really goes on in the beef box? Will the world ever know?

Movie Review: Age of Ultron

When I was 7, my dad gave me a pile of his old comics from when he was a kid. I had Captain Britain, The Defenders, and Dan Dare amongst many others, and I had a lot of favorites. The character that leapt off the page at me though, the character that stuck with me ever since; was the philosophical, maniacal robotic arch nemesis of the Avengers, Ultron.

You can imagine how excited I was when Ultron was revealed as the antagonist in the sequel to Marvel’s immensely successful The Avengers. When his actor was revealed as James Spader, with his gravelly southern voice, I was at first skeptical. I was expecting the announcement to be of an actor with a famously recognizable voice, like Malcolm McDowell.

The moment I saw that first trailer, all my fears were put to rest. Spader’s commanding drawl is so perfectly condescending, intellectually superior, even bored sounding, it fit the character wonderfully.

From that moment on, going into this one, I was excited.

I was not disappointed.

With every step forward into Marvel’s Cinematic Universe, it feels more like the spirit of the comics. From the very beginning, we see the Avengers working together as a coordinated team battling their old enemies Hydra. It’s fluid, and fun and incredibly put together visually. Each member seems to have been developed since the last film, both in the way they function within the team, interacting with their fellow members, and how they act on a personal basis. We see a little more of everyone here, more personal scenes, more fight scenes, more everything.

Most of all, this is a character based movie. It’s wall to wall action, sure, but everyone has their moment of drama, and the dialogue is well written for pretty much every personality involved. It isn’t just Iron Man starring the Avengers anymore, every character has screen time on and off the field of combat. 

Not an easy feat, considering they are juggling five popular main characters, and some major satellite characters too. While Downey Jr’s Stark is still the funniest character in the film, with comebacks and dialogue so sharp and well delivered it almost seems improvised, there’s also great moments from the supporting cast, Don Cheadle’s War Machine standing out in his scenes by far. Conspicuously absent amongst the ensemble are fan favorites (and eternal girlbait) Agent Coulson and Loki, however.

There’s great scenes of casual interplay between the Avengers. The snappy dialogue in hectic combat is even better in casual situations, with great scenes of macho competition, honest flirtation, and scientific ambition. It’s difficult not to love each of the Avengers, with even the less focal ones getting great scenes here.

No time is wasted on early exposition, or introducing characters we already know. The setup is here and ready from point one, and it doesn’t take long for the main plot to kick in after the brilliant opening scene. During a celebratory party in the Avenger’s tower, the first form of the titular villain shows himself. 

At first I was taken aback by the frank quirkiness of Ultron’s dialogue. There’s no technobabble or stereotypical ‘robot character’ dialogue, he’s very human. He’s cocky, even funny. I realized that the character, a product of alien technology mixed with Tony Stark’s automated Iron Army program, has taken on some of Stark’s personality traits, and shares his cynical, comical side. It works. Ultron is an enjoyable villain to watch, he talks like Stark, with his constant megalomania and superiority turned up to eleven. His first scene, analyzing the simple flaws in the existence of the world as we see it, is just brilliant.

By instantaneous access to all the worlds information, Ultron goes from birth to master plan in a matter of minutes, so it all kicks off pretty soon from there on, with a globetrotting series of events pursuing Ultron across the world. The story is kinetic, never staying in one place for long. The Avengers are dragged through a series of trials, facing more new enemies in the Maximoff twins, not named as such here but better known to comic fans as Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch. These two are more enjoyable than I expected, having never been a fan of either before. With some acceptable neutral Slavic accents, they form the basis of Ultron’s cadre of main antagonists. Quicksilver snatching arrows out of the air with his super speed and Scarlet Witch bending the minds of our heroes to show them their worst fears. With a team of heroes as powerful as the Avengers, turning them against one another has long been the classic way to deliver a challenge.

Quicksilver’s inclusion will inevitably be compared to the characters recent appearance in X-Men: Days of Future past, and I have to say, regardless of some fun visual gags, he isn’t half as exciting here. In DOFP, we saw incredible use of the characters super speed in a variety of ways, Age of Ultron’s Quicksilver is just not up to that standard, although he is well performed and enjoyable to watch.

The twin’s inevitable heel/face turn is one of the movies short order points, in my opinion, a little brief, and they are awfully quick to ally with a character that was revealed in a prior monologue to be the source of a lifetime of constant fear and oppression for the two. Also, without the twins as sidekicks, Ultron is the lone antagonist for most of the films runtime, and as great a villain as he is, there’s something video-gamey about the Avengers battling an endless supply of identical robot drones. These large scale battle scenes, all inclusive of almost every character, are a visual masterpiece, certainly, but they don’t have the urgency or intensity necessary in a lot of the situations. We know any member of the Avengers will defeat a hundred of these enemies in a scene like this, so there’s no genuine threat there. The real joy in the films battle scenes come from other sources, like the brilliant punch up between a pissed off Hulk and the long awaited Iron Man Hulk-Buster armour. This one is fantastic. Hulk is his absolute finest here, made genuinely scary by showing us that he isn’t just the strongest thing on the battlefield, but that he’s fast too. Iron Man attempting to stop the rampaging green menace whilst simultaneously trying to protect the undefended city and the populace around them is just great, and will be the main event of the film for many viewers.

The Hulk has a lot of character development here, and along with Black Widow and Hawkeye, forms the Avengers that we see a much more intimate side of. An emerging romance and personal secrets  are introduced that we hadn’t previously seen, and it serves to remind there’s a lot more going on here than just saving the world. 

Speaking of which, the exact peril the world is in, isn’t as clear as it perhaps could have been. Exactly what Ultron’s plan was I felt wasn’t all that obvious until the films finale. It feels at times like the storyline is moving to a time limit we aren’t really seeing. It doesn’t make it any less fun, but the real feeling of tension generated by threat through the second act just wasn’t there.

The film’s final act introduces a major hero in the form of one of the comic’s most mysterious, enigmatic characters. If you’ve made it this far without knowing who that is, I don’t want to spoil it for you. I’ll say he’s played beautifully, with just the right edge of childlike wonder and enlightened gravity that the character needs, by a brilliant British actor who has long deserved a role so big. One perfectly played moment in his first scene had the whole audience cheering, and you’ll know it when you see it.

Age of Ultron may not be the epic entry in the MCU it could have been. It serves to develop characters and move the whole story forward rather than end anything or bring it all together, but it’s sharply written, well put together, and has some truly enjoyable performances by characters both old and new. There’s so much going on in the MCU, with developments in this film leading to at least 4 separate future films, and it’s hard not to want to get involved in all of them. It’s just like reading the comics, you can’t read only one, there's too much fun to be had by diving right into the whole world.

Movie Review: Furious 7

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.

 The action moves to a global scale, chasing bad guys and the illusive technical macguffin to the most stylized version of Abu Dhabi you've seen since Sex and the City 2 (I can't be the only person to see both these films). You've got your insane high speed battle scene, with the Italian Job style formation of supercars chasing a military primed bus with miniguns in the sides, and you've got your tuxedos and evening gown rumble in the heights of a penthouse atop one of the Etihad Towers. In fact, why only one of them when you can drive your bulletproof car between them?

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.