"Furious 7" is one of the best action movies - ever.

Rating: 9/10 (3 April 2015)

This is Paul Walker's final film. That's the armored truck in the room when talking about "Furious 7" (PG-13, 2:17), so I might as well address it up front. During a break from filming this installment, franchise regular Paul Walker died in a single-car crash on November 30, 2013. While mourning his loss, the film's producers set out to alter the script and make a plan to finish the movie without one of their most important characters. Walker had completed filming most of his dialog before his death. Four men similar in physique to Walker, including his brothers, Caleb and Cody, were hired to help complete Walker's scenes. All that, with a little CGI help, has produced a film which is likely to please action film fans and Paul Walker fans the world over.
This film's story begins at the end of the last film, "Fast & Furious 6" (2013). The last scene in that film has someone killing Han (Sung Kang) on the streets of Tokyo and immediately making a phone call saying, "You don't know me. You're about to." Early in "Furious 7" we see that the recipient of that call was none other than Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel), the only character to appear in all seven movies. The villain making the call is Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham), the older brother of the man who Dominic and company defeated and left for dead in the previous film. Immediately after the call, a package explodes, destroying the home of Brian O'Conner (Paul Walker), his wife Mia (Jordana Brewster) and their young son. All three of them (along with Dominic) narrowly escape being killed, as does Luke, whom Shaw attacked at work. As Tej (Chris "Ludacris" Bridges) says to Roman (Tyrese Gibson) at Han's funeral, "We're being hunted." Indeed they are. They need to get to Shaw before he can get any more of them.
A mysterious government agent (Kurt Russell), who simply refers to himself as "Mr. Nobody" can help Dominic's gang, but Nobody needs something in return. A terrorist named Jakande (Djimon Hounsou) has stolen a computer chip that Nobody refers to as "God's Eye" and also kidnapped the program's designer, known only as "Ramsey" (Nathalie Emmanuel). God's Eye can use "anything with a lens or a microphone" (surveillance cameras, cell phones, etc.) and facial recognition software to find anyone in the world. Mr. Nobody tells Dominic that, if his gang can retrieve the computer chip, then he can use it to find Shaw. Dom agrees and Nobody assembles Dom's crew, including Letty (Michelle Rodriguez), who is still struggling to regain the memory she lost in a major accident earlier in the series. The quest for the chip and, ultimately for the chance to kill Shaw before he kills all of them, takes this "family", as Dom calls them, to Azerbaijan, Abu Dhabi and back home to Los Angeles. Along the way, the gang find themselves in all manner of deadly situations. Anyone who has seen the movie's theatrical trailer can tell that the action is the wildest yet, and can only guess that there's a lot more where that came from. (They'd be guessing right.) Not only is the action in "Furious 7" the best in the franchise to date, so is the film. Sure, some of the dialog can be a bit hokey and the beatings the characters take should either kill them or land them in the hospital right next to The Rock's character, but that's all part of the fun. The film's plot allows us to see the characters in a variety of exciting chase scenes, intense fight scenes and practically impossible scenes of "vehicular warfare", all while dealing with some serious real life situations. I meant real life as in the lives of their characters, but the movie also deftly handles the real life human tragedy of Walker's untimely passing. When I reviewed the previous entry of this franchise, I gave it a "B+" and wrote "with the possibility of an even higher grade for the next one, based on the last scene of this one." I got what I hoped for. "Furious 7" is one of the best action movies – ever. "A"