Worst Movie of the Year (So Far)

Rating: 2/10 (4 April 2015)

I love blockbusters but I don't love this one.
Furious 7 is a sexist, racist, trite film that does not even amount to the levels of The Avengers - a film it tries very hard to be. But even as a blockbuster with hundreds of millions in funding where we might forgive the rampant presence of -isms (seems backwards, doesn't it?) to please a general audience (falsley presumed to be White, Straight, and Cis-Gendered), we find ourselves in nothing but muck.
In the first 15 minutes, we're subjected to women as props being sprayed with water with as little clothing as possible. Equal opportunity to delight straight female viewers or gay men is forgotten entirely as the objectification of the female props decorates the set. Did Vin Diesel and manage to negotiate as a producer that he could gain 20 lbs and not take off his shirt at all? Were the producers simply frat boys that don't know how to make women into 3 dimensional characters and scream "eww!" at the sign of male cleavage? Probably.
If that isn't enough, Iggy Azalea, the very symbol of White people pretending to be from the streets, makes a pointless cameo with a terrible American accent and the entire movie is a setup for a letdown right then and there.
Furious 7 delves deeper into its own chasm of stupidity by tokening its characters - good guys and bad guys. Roman is used is as the sassy black woman and Letti is turned into a practical girl from a novella ("I have to find myself, Dom!" *tears in her eyes falling to her booty shorts.) When it comes to the bad guys, you have the token Asian that knows martial arts and the token black guy that's a terrorist. Djimon Hounsou is wasted in this film.
The only characters worth their salt are Dom, who doesn't exactly evolve but does have a character arc, and Tej (played by Ludicrous) who's character is not simply a witty black man but a competent hacker with good insights.
The globe trotting film however makes a very disastrous mistake by portraying Abu Dabi infactually with women walking around in bikinis. Any individual with vague knowledge of the world knows that this is a country where women wearing a bikini is basically illegal and will get you thrown in jail or fined. A simple fact checking might have saved the film this humiliation.
But that's the essence of the film. Silly and sometimes terrible writing. Even as the film attempts to assemble a bountiful team of amazing drivers and skilled fighters, all of the one-liners fall completely flat. Take for instance Hobbe's one line to Letti during a confrontation. "Woman. I am the calvary." Maybe it was Dwayne Johnson's delivery, or maybe it was the 15th failed one liner in a row, but it was awful.
The only reason this film gets two stars out of me is the amazing tribute to Paul Walker and all the fake outs of his character's death through the film. Without it, the movie would be complete trash. Actually, it is trash, it just has a great tribute at the end which is surprisingly affective.