"Furious 7" begs us to further embrace the insane joyride and ignore the rest

Rating: 6/10 (26 April 2017)

After "Fast & Furious 6" shifted the action of this mega-series into a gear not known to man — one resembling a superhero movie far more than an action franchise — those following the "Fast & Furious" had to either get on board or jump out. So the mantra for enjoying "Furious 7" is "embrace the insanity." You either get a kick out of it or you don't.
For all the crazy stuff they pulled in 6, there's an equal or one-up in 7. In the last movie you had the crew trying to take down a massive cargo plane; in this movie you have cars skydiving out of a massive cargo plane. Even when you can guess something insane is coming, you still can't believe what the filmmakers decided to do. For example, a sequence in Abu Dhabi involves the crew needing to steal something locked inside of a rare and exotic car locked in a safe room at the top of one of the city's biggest buildings. Need I say more?
The plot holds a little less water than 6, and to say that any "F&F" plot holds any more or less water than another is a big difference. The film is put in motion by the events of 6, as that film's baddie, Owen Shaw (Luke Evans), is in a coma, and his special ops older brother, Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham) wants revenge on Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and company. Plausible, except that Deckard has an uncanny ability to track people down, show up in the right place at the right time, sneak into government facilities, perfectly time explosives and stay one step ahead of everyone — all by himself.
OK, easy enough to embrace that insanity. But after Dominic decides to go after Shaw, a mysterious suit and tie named Mr. Nobody (Kurt Russell) shows up with a small army to save the day and offer Dominic all his resources to track Shaw down if he and his crew can rescue a hacker (Nathalie Emmanuel) from a band of mercenaries led by Mose Jakande (Djimon Honsou) and find a device she invented called the God's Eye that turns all devices into the world into a personal surveillance system that can track anyone  All this to justify sending Dom, O'Conner (Paul Walker), Letty (Michelle Rodriguez), Roman (Tyrese Gibson) and Tej (Chris Bridges) to the Caucasus Mountains, Abu Dhabi and beyond. It's not longtime series writer Chris Morgan's finest work.
With the "we don't care about physics" cat out of the bag, the sky is literally the limit for what these characters can do or endure. The highs of the movie come from this potential for unbelievably imaginative sequences, but so many scenes lose suspense because we know that our heroes can fall, roll over and get crushed countless times and emerge virtually unscathed. In fact, it's kind of ridiculous that Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) actually ends up in the hospital after a "nearly fatal" fall early in the movie. The film's most suspenseful moment involves O'Conner, but perhaps because Walker's untimely death during production had audiences in suspense over how his character would bow out.
Walker's unfinished work is hard to detect. A few scenes seem out of place in an effort to use actual footage of Walker whenever possible, but if you had no idea he died during production, you'd be taken by surprise by the film's tribute ending. It really only provides us emotional catharsis for losing Paul Walker, not for the departure of Brian O'Conner from these stories. His character arc just doesn't feel complete, but undoubtedly there was only so much the filmmakers could do.
Horror aficionado James Wan, taking over for four-time "F&F" director Justin Lin, brings a lot of Lin's style and adds a signature in various 90-degree camera rotations that usually follow characters in action sequences when they are not standing upright and usually in the air or falling. In a way, these shots acknowledge the unrealistic nature of the action scenes.
"Furious 7" probably takes itself the least seriously of all the movies thus far, and in that sense, it makes all the ridiculousness easier to stomach. Gibson's Pierce is really forced into the jokester role, and he manages a few laughs that he wasn't getting (from this critic) in previous films when he was prematurely being shoehorned into that stereotype. And Hobbs' return after being out of the middle act of the movie is perhaps the biggest signal that we're all supposed to just be having fun together.
These movies haven't quite done enough to reach a higher echelon of quality given the relaxed attitude toward good storytelling, but it's clear to anyone that they are not trying to meet any needs beyond a fun time. Hence, each movie grades out pretty similarly, with a little variation here and there. If we weren't familiar with and invested in the characters and if the budget for these movies weren't so astronomical that we could have fun watching them just because they have the money to show off, the litany of flaws would be more apparent. The high entertainment value and lack of substance pretty much offset each other, resulting in movies that are immensely watchable yet only so satisfying.
~Steven C
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