Ridiculous, entertaining and, ultimately, moving

Rating: 8/10 (10 April 2015)

Dom's family comes under threat from Deckard Shaw, the brother of the fellow they were up against in episode 6. Also, a mysterious government fellow pressures them to rescue a hacker who has invented a whizzo bit of kit which can spy on anyone on the planet.
This series started out as rough, tough, cargasm movies, but it has gradually morphed via James Bond/Mission Impossible car-based action movies into, at this point, super-hero movies – Vin Diesel and Jason Statham both display levels of invulnerability which Superman would be proud of. If you thought the 25 mile airport runway in episode 6 was stretching things a bit, wait until you see what happens with the red car in this one. The action is absolutely preposterous, and highly entertaining, even if none of it makes any sense at all (the government seriously has no operatives that can do this kind of thing, so they have to recruit a bunch of freelance drivers to bale out of a cargo plane in their cars? Really?).
Underwriting the whole thing is the knowledge of Paul Walker's death during production, necessitating rewriting and a variety of tricks to bring his character into scenes not filmed at that point. On the whole, this has been fairly well done, and there is little in the way of clunky moments when Walker's absence is obvious, which just leaves the awareness of his death and how that might impact on the story. Credit to the cast and crew for allowing the character to exit the series in a dignified and pleasing way, and for adding a moving coda by way of tribute which is dramatically fitting, thematically appropriate to the character and the saga, and full of obvious love for their lost friend and brother.