Adrenaline fuelled roller-coaster of a movie with an emotional element, which needs to be viewed without any logical thinking or hopes of realistic storytelling.

Rating: 7/10 (7 June 2016)

Furious 7, the seventh instalment in the Fast and Furious franchise is bigger than ever; The action scenes are longer, more spectacular, more ridiculous and more adrenaline pumped! It's best for you if you just ignore the plot of the movie and enjoy it for what it is; a fun popcorn flick with some brilliant throwbacks to 90's action movies with its cheesy dialogue and clichÃ© moments.
The action: No matter how you look at it or what overall opinion you have of this movie or indeed the franchise as a whole; the action is breathtakingly good. Of course many scenes are clichÃ© Hollywood with choppy editing and shaky cam, especially is the one on one combat scenes but that is something you should expect when it's a cast of Hollywood actors and not martial arts experts. The car scenes are superb, it has a real heist movie theme and the scene in the base when they drive out of the plane and the tower block scene is ludicrous, practically hilarious but very well made all the same. Instalment upon instalment these movies get bigger and bigger and if you were to rate Furious 7 on the execution and creativity of the action sequences alone, It would be a very strong movie.
The Plot: The plot really is very week and all over the place, it lacks any real cohesion by being far too jumbled, contradicting and fails to maintain basic common sense. Jason Statham plays Shaw, brother to the villain who is defeated in the previous movie, who is after revenge against Vin Diesel and his crew. However Vin Diesel, in order to try and get to Statham first, works with the government to try and obtain a worldwide super tracker which is a very intelligent item which hacks into CCTV all around the world and can locate somebody in a matter of minutes. So while they are chasing the people who have stolen this piece of kit, Statham is also chasing them. No matter where Vin Diesel & co go in the world, Statham crops up trying to kill them while they run away again. Essentially they are chasing a team which have this tracking kit, in order to use the tracker to locate the man who is constantly following them. Yeah, as I said, the plot is stupid and offensive to anybody who has an IQ of 25 and upwards, so it is much better if you simply switch off from that and enjoy the action. It's almost as if they created the action scenes they wanted to use and then struggled to link them together so they came up with pointless reasons for the actors to go to completely different locations for the action sequence to play out, and then for them to move on completely from that location to somewhere new for another blockbuster action scene. Now, I'm not naÃ¯ve, I didn't go into Furious 7 expecting the Shawshank Redemption in terms of story-telling, but at least try and come up with a cohesive , interconnected storyline that we can get immersed into in-between all the action.
Paul Walker: Having watched all 6 previous movies, I was sad to hear of the sudden death of Paul Walker part way through the filming of Furious 7. I was intrigued to know how they would complete the filming of the movie after they announced, against a lot of speculation, that they wouldn't scrap what they had already filmed and they would be completing it. I take my hat off to the whole team and director for what they did, it must have been such a hard task to do it so convincingly but they worked with what they had and pulled it off as best as they could. They apparently used body doubles, CGI and Paul Walkers brother for the scenes filmed after his death. I noticed the body double scenes during the fighting scenes, a couple of one on one scenes we don't see Paul Walkers face, just strategically timed shots of the back/side of his head and lots of body shots. The CGI is a little awkward to see and I can imagine it was upsetting for his family and friends, it isn't used too heavily and looks like a video game character but for certain scenes we really needed to see his face. You can tell the storyline is a little jumbled up due to his death but the final moments were emotional and gave a fitting, heartfelt goodbye to Paul Walker, it wasn't too sloppy and kept within the feel of the franchise. It was in context of the movie but was also felt on a personal level from Vin Diesel.
A big gripe for me was the lack of involvement from the Rock. Whether it was his choice to have a small part due to other commitments or the creators deciding to give him less screen time, whichever it was I thought it was a shame that he didn't have a bigger part. Some of the best scenes come from his presence being in them and to not have him for the majority of this movie was a negative move.
Overall, Fast 7 is a decent action movie with some simply incredible scenes. It's a popcorn flick, and that's it. The plot is a mess and the storytelling is probably the worst of the lot (beside Tokyo Drift, obviously). The send-off to Paul Walker was emotional and fitting, adding something special to the seventh instalment of this franchise. There will be an eight movie, which has been confirmed, I also wouldn't be surprised if there was a ninth, tenth and so on. It's a cash cow, it's not everybody's cup of tea and it's far from perfect but it did entertain me, and that's what it tries to do.
7/10