B-class action movie with A-class sfx

Rating: 4/10 (3 May 2015)

I don't even know where to start but this film was perhaps the most mind numbing action film I've seen for a long time. Definitely not worth going to theaters. That's it in a nutshell.
Fast and Furious has come a long way from the first movie to its seventh installment. Franchise is very popular and hence the high amount of sequels. I genuinely liked the first one and few sequels were okay too. But now, director James Wan tries to poke the series with his "vision" that seems more like a producers and studios vision. Director has made a lot of good horror movies which I like a lot. Seemingly the guy can technically make a fast paced action films like this one too but the end result lacks charisma and is very messy with music video style fast cuts, shaky cams, "camera rolls" and what not. This is a movie for ADHD generation for sure since its mostly hard to make out anything what's happening on the screen. Viewer is filled with constant stream of V8 growl, fist fights, missiles blowing up, cars flying trough mountain cliffs, cars flying trough sky scrapers, ... well you get the point. You can leave your brains home if you go see this. There is very little drama or calm moments and when there is such, the dialog is juvenile and ultra clichéd. "I should have done that long time ago", "I belong home and I love you forever after", etc etc. Such poor and uninspired writing. Even much poorer than I though is possible for this franchise.
So the script was pretty ridiculous with a lot taken from James Bond, Oceans Eleven series or your generic buddy agent film. I guess they are starting to run out of ideas if they have to transform a street racing subculture film into an agent romp with bullets flying. FF was never about guns or "breaking in to top secret facility with a team of highly skilled specialist". Script was just all over the place with explosions, fist fights, going to random places, throwing forgettable one liners... That saddened me. Cars and racing culture were not in the limelight. I was so begging the film to end midways since there was too much non-stop generic action that I've seen million times before. There is absolutely nothing new and memorable in this film you haven't seen in any b-class action movie already.
Physics and realism were totally forgot and people jumped from high speed moving cars to asphalt, rolled 100 meters down a mountain cliff, had head-to-head car crash, got hit multiple times with iron bar, flew from fourth floor landing on top of a car, and all this without characters barely sustaining a scratch! Wow. This is actually more superhero movie than Avengers because you can't kill those guys! I expect mindless action movies at least have a decent respect to laws of physics and human body. Oh yeah, and then there was a scene with cars dropped from a plane and landing perfectly on the tiny road many kilometers below them. Just splendid... Also the action and sfx wasn't that spectacular either and I'm truly baffled how they managed to spend 190M on this. They actually used stickers as "bullet holes" on cars in many shots. Last time I saw that being done was some Steven Seagal movie from 90s. Surely there was lots of cars being wrecked but somehow it all seemed bland perhaps because of fast cutting or shaky cam.
I will give this 4 instead of 3 just because of the touching montage and salute they put for Paul Walker at the end. Too damn shame that he passed away since I liked him a lot as an actor and he seemed like a nice guy. He would have deserved a lot better movie than this unmemorable piece of action mess.