Alternate Title: As The Rock Turns
One sentence synopsis: Following a shocking betrayal from within, the Toretto crew must team up
with old friends and adversaries to stop an international
cyber-terrorist from seizing control of a doomsday weapon.
Things Havoc liked: Let us now consider a work of high art...
The Fast and Furious
franchise is one of the strangest things in film, an action movie series
that somehow re-invented itself halfway through and became awesome on
its fifth installment. How it did this is a complete mystery to me,
partly because this is something that is simply never done, and partly
because I took one look at the original Fast and the Furious and noped
out right then and there. It took the dregs of 2015's indie dreck to
drag me, kicking and screaming, into Fast & Furious 7, where I
discovered to my amazement that the series had metamorphed into an
action-soap opera involving wonderful self-aware humor, and some of the
most ludicrous action setpieces I've seen since the heyday of the 80s.
The writing was terrible, the actors sub-par, the plot ludicrous, the
movie patently stupid. I kind of loved it. And now here we are, two
years later, with another sequel, the eighth in the franchise, and one
which has, at time of writing, scored the biggest opening weekend in the
history of cinema (a record that is broken every six months or so, but
still). Not bad for a movie series where two of the lead characters
can't act and the third one is dead.
Too soon?
The Fate of the Furious is a movie directly taken from the vein of the previous films (I assume. Remember, I haven't seen any but 1 and 7). Dominic (Vin Diesel) and Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) are on their honeymoon in Cuba, visiting old friends, when trouble arrives in the form of Charlize Theron's Cypher, a super-hacker/Bond villain with ties to Dom's past (after eight movies, are there people still in existence who do not have ties to Dom's past?) out to do nefarious things for the sake of being nefarious. This is the sort of villain character that we have seen time and again in bad action movie after bad action movie, but this is Charlize Theron, a woman who embodies campy insanity, as a glance at the Snow White and the Huntsman movies will tell you, and she makes it work by vamping it up with icy-blonde dreadlocks and a murderous stare. She joins a cast that by now has passed unmanagably large and entered ludicrous territory (zing!), including The Rock, Kurt Russell, and F&F7's main villain (now converted into a protagonist, like every Fast and Furious villain), Jason Statham. Each and every one of these men are veterans of myriad bad action movies, and know just what they are doing here, from The Rock's larger-than-life personality (an early scene where he coaches a girls' soccer team includes a hilarious bit I would not dream of spoiling), to Kurt Russel's cock-eyed, self-assured arrogance
(something
he does oh-so-well), to Jason Statham's virtuosity when playing an
abrasive asshole (something he is so much better at than playing a
leading nice guy). These characters join the "crew", now comprising
half-a-dozen members in their own right, even without the late Paul
Walker, including Ludacris, Tyrese Gibson (I love these two men so
much), Nathalie Emmanuel (who played a hacker character in the seventh
movie that I assumed was disposable, forgetting that this series never
discards anyone), Michelle Rodriguez, Elsa Pataky, and... you know what
if I keep going, we're gonna be here all day, so let's just leave it at
"also everyone else in the universe". Some of these people are good
actors, some are not, but every one of them inhabits a lived-in role
designed just for them, one that fits their strengths and er...
non-strengths... just right, with the result that even the bad
performances are charming in their own way. This isn't a movie you go
to see in order to watch great thespians bare their souls. It's a movie
you go to see to watch shit explode and one-liners said.
So who is the ringmaster of this absurd collection of action movie tropes and variable-quality acting? None other than F. Gary Gray, who we last saw two years ago directing the incomparable musical biopic Straight Outta Compton. One forgets, given the critical acclaim that movie produced, that Gray got his start directing stupid, stupid action movies like The Negotiator, The Italian Job (the 2003 version), and Law Abiding Citizen. While I would not recommend you all run out to find those movies (especially not the last one), they are in the vein of this sort of willfully absurd action extravaganza, and fortunately, Gray, as well as long time series screenwriter Chris Morgan (whose other work we shall not speak of here), seem to have found their senses of humor this time to go along with the ridiculous action. One of the secrets of this series' success is just how little it cares about how dumb everything is, and while it's hardly the first action series to give in to the stupidity and just run with everything, Gray succeeds where others fail by playing up the melodrama of everything to truly hilarious levels. Characters cannot simply discuss their feelings, they must weep and wail and gnash their teeth and cast about for scenery to chew upon, so overwrought are they by the soap opera-style drama and relationship complexities that overcome them minute by minute. With a lesser cast, this sort of thing would be insufferable, but Gray trusts his cast to go for it, relying on the good actors (or at least the good bad actors) to carry the bad ones through the material, and the stunts and action to take care of the rest.
Oh did I mention there was action in this movie? Because there is. And it's awesome. Granted, I don't know that anything will top the sheer lunacy that was the climax to the last
movie (recall that that one ended with an akimbo lug-wrench fight
between Vin Diesel and Jason Statham on top of a collapsing building),
but I'll be damned if they don't try. Listing everything insane that
happens in this movie would take a hundred years, but standout sequences
include one where a computer hacker seizes control of thousands of
self-driving cars for a chase through New York City, one that quickly
comes to echo the zombie hordes from World War Z more than your
traditional car chase. An extended, Mad-Max-style car chase sequence on
a frozen estuary livens things up with the addition of a nuclear submarine
to the mix, while Jason Statham, in the company of several cameos that
made us all howl with laughter, gets to have a brutal hand to hand fight
with innumerable military goons while holding a baby in a bassinet. I
won't say this is the weirdest fight I've seen Statham engage in (the
aforementioned lugwrench fight comes to mind, as does the occasion in
The Expendables 2 when he fought off a platoon of soldiers with an
incense censer), but it's one of the funniest, as Statham mugs for the
baby (and the camera) during the entire engagement, which had me, at
least, in stitches.
Things Havoc liked: Let us now consider a work of high art...
The Fast and Furious
franchise is one of the strangest things in film, an action movie series
that somehow re-invented itself halfway through and became awesome on
its fifth installment. How it did this is a complete mystery to me,
partly because this is something that is simply never done, and partly
because I took one look at the original Fast and the Furious and noped
out right then and there. It took the dregs of 2015's indie dreck to
drag me, kicking and screaming, into Fast & Furious 7, where I
discovered to my amazement that the series had metamorphed into an
action-soap opera involving wonderful self-aware humor, and some of the
most ludicrous action setpieces I've seen since the heyday of the 80s.
The writing was terrible, the actors sub-par, the plot ludicrous, the
movie patently stupid. I kind of loved it. And now here we are, two
years later, with another sequel, the eighth in the franchise, and one
which has, at time of writing, scored the biggest opening weekend in the
history of cinema (a record that is broken every six months or so, but
still). Not bad for a movie series where two of the lead characters
can't act and the third one is dead.Too soon?
The Fate of the Furious is a movie directly taken from the vein of the previous films (I assume. Remember, I haven't seen any but 1 and 7). Dominic (Vin Diesel) and Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) are on their honeymoon in Cuba, visiting old friends, when trouble arrives in the form of Charlize Theron's Cypher, a super-hacker/Bond villain with ties to Dom's past (after eight movies, are there people still in existence who do not have ties to Dom's past?) out to do nefarious things for the sake of being nefarious. This is the sort of villain character that we have seen time and again in bad action movie after bad action movie, but this is Charlize Theron, a woman who embodies campy insanity, as a glance at the Snow White and the Huntsman movies will tell you, and she makes it work by vamping it up with icy-blonde dreadlocks and a murderous stare. She joins a cast that by now has passed unmanagably large and entered ludicrous territory (zing!), including The Rock, Kurt Russell, and F&F7's main villain (now converted into a protagonist, like every Fast and Furious villain), Jason Statham. Each and every one of these men are veterans of myriad bad action movies, and know just what they are doing here, from The Rock's larger-than-life personality (an early scene where he coaches a girls' soccer team includes a hilarious bit I would not dream of spoiling), to Kurt Russel's cock-eyed, self-assured arrogance
So who is the ringmaster of this absurd collection of action movie tropes and variable-quality acting? None other than F. Gary Gray, who we last saw two years ago directing the incomparable musical biopic Straight Outta Compton. One forgets, given the critical acclaim that movie produced, that Gray got his start directing stupid, stupid action movies like The Negotiator, The Italian Job (the 2003 version), and Law Abiding Citizen. While I would not recommend you all run out to find those movies (especially not the last one), they are in the vein of this sort of willfully absurd action extravaganza, and fortunately, Gray, as well as long time series screenwriter Chris Morgan (whose other work we shall not speak of here), seem to have found their senses of humor this time to go along with the ridiculous action. One of the secrets of this series' success is just how little it cares about how dumb everything is, and while it's hardly the first action series to give in to the stupidity and just run with everything, Gray succeeds where others fail by playing up the melodrama of everything to truly hilarious levels. Characters cannot simply discuss their feelings, they must weep and wail and gnash their teeth and cast about for scenery to chew upon, so overwrought are they by the soap opera-style drama and relationship complexities that overcome them minute by minute. With a lesser cast, this sort of thing would be insufferable, but Gray trusts his cast to go for it, relying on the good actors (or at least the good bad actors) to carry the bad ones through the material, and the stunts and action to take care of the rest.
Oh did I mention there was action in this movie? Because there is. And it's awesome. Granted, I don't know that anything will top the sheer lunacy that was the climax to the last
movie (recall that that one ended with an akimbo lug-wrench fight
between Vin Diesel and Jason Statham on top of a collapsing building),
but I'll be damned if they don't try. Listing everything insane that
happens in this movie would take a hundred years, but standout sequences
include one where a computer hacker seizes control of thousands of
self-driving cars for a chase through New York City, one that quickly
comes to echo the zombie hordes from World War Z more than your
traditional car chase. An extended, Mad-Max-style car chase sequence on
a frozen estuary livens things up with the addition of a nuclear submarine
to the mix, while Jason Statham, in the company of several cameos that
made us all howl with laughter, gets to have a brutal hand to hand fight
with innumerable military goons while holding a baby in a bassinet. I
won't say this is the weirdest fight I've seen Statham engage in (the
aforementioned lugwrench fight comes to mind, as does the occasion in
The Expendables 2 when he fought off a platoon of soldiers with an
incense censer), but it's one of the funniest, as Statham mugs for the
baby (and the camera) during the entire engagement, which had me, at
least, in stitches.
That said, there's nothing wrong with the concept of course, in fact more movies could stand to have a showcase of characters of different ethnicities, backgrounds, and accents like this, family or not. But if you're going to have a cast this size, then the question of what the hell to do with everyone is going to rear its head, and while the film manages to give most of the cast something to do, there's an unavoidable sense that some people are just here because they're expected to be here. With so much attention on Dom's dilemma and his cat-and-mouse games with Theron's evil villainess, the rest of his crew gets short shrift. Gibson and Ludacris are mostly there to score points off one another and flirt with Emmanuel, Rodriguez has nothing whatsoever to do besides look constipated and growl the word family every five minutes, and a new character, a stick-in-the-mud G-man played by Suicide Squad's Scott Eastwood (because an association with fucking Suicide Squad was what this series needed), is pretty much introduced becasue we need someone to play the handsome generic white dude in the absence of Paul Walker, and I guess he'll do. Even The Rock, whom I adore to death, has very little material in this film, other than a handful of fun scenes playing off his rivalry with Statham. I understand that there's a limited number of movie minutes to go around, but a film that fails to use The Rock properly is a movie that is struggling to invent a reason why everyone is there. I grant that plot is a tertiary concern at best in a movie like this, but there has to be something in it for everyone, or the film will begin to resemble nothing but franchise maintenance, along the lines of the third films from the X-Men and Iron Man series.
That said, for all my reservations, I do recommend Fate of the Furious, perhaps not as strongly as its predecessor, but strongly nonetheless, as only in this series have I found such a wonderful disregard of logic crossed with an embracing of fun, despite all the efforts to ape it by lesser studios and series. For my part, I shall file this one away as a lesser-but-still-fun episode of my favorite action-soap opera, and wait for better things. Of course, given the fact that Fate of the Furious has just finished making roughly all of the money in existence, I expect that the aforementioned cast will soon have an opportunity to try the whole exercise again. And when they do, I will be there to see it.
Final Score: 6/10
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