Universal Pictures
Films about drifting are not in my wheelhouse. I don’t think I’m quite the target audience for a franchise like The Fast & the Furious. I’m a suburban white girl who’s not really into muscle cars or living life on the edge. In fact, I hadn’t seen a single Fast & Furious film until I was asked to review Furious 7. I fully went into it thinking, “I’m sooo going to hate this, but at least there will be eye candy/bulging biceps thanks to Paul Walker, Vin Diesel and The Rock.” After seven films, I wondered how good the storyline could possibly be and whether or not it was even capable of holding my interest.
I wondered how obvious it’d be that Paul Walker died before they were through with filming. I had read that his younger brothers were going to stand in and do some of the shots they hadn’t completed yet, but how was that going to work exactly? I wondered if they were going to kill off his character in the film or let him “retire” with dignity as was being speculated by industry insiders long before its release. Despite all of these perceived shortcomings, Furious 7 surprised me more often than not. I actually enjoyed it. It was a non-stop adrenaline rush with airborne, gravity-defying cars, fiery explosions, exotic locales, corny one-liners (a la an ‘80s action movie) and so many badasses that I couldn’t possibly decide who was the toughest of them all. Ok, so that’s probably not true. Everyone probably has their favorite, but I’m going to side with The Rock on that one. There’s one scene in which he actually rips off his own cast, resets his broken arm and then drives an ambulance just so he can be in the thick of it all. When he says he’s the cavalry, there are no arguments from me. Look at those guns!
Furious 7 is a non-stop adrenaline rush. tweet
I came into Furious 7 knowing nothing about the characters or where they’ve been in their respective story arcs, and yet that didn’t seem to matter. It was easy enough to figure out some of the backstory, though maybe not all of it. Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker) are best buds with an appreciation for fast cars. Apparently, Brian was a former cop who ended up marrying Dom’s sister Mia (Jordana Brewster). He is now the reluctant father driving around his young son in a minivan instead of the fast and furious cars he’s used to driving. Brian is struggling to figure out where he belongs – as a family man with the lovely Mia or back in the fast lane with Dom and his crew.
Even the women in this franchise are badasses. Dom’s love interest Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) was apparently involved in a car crash or something previously that erased her memory. She goes through an amnesiac struggle to figure out who she is and how she fits in with the rest of this motley crew, all while kicking ass and making it look good. She has an epic fight scene in Abu Dhabi with MMA fighter Ronda Rousey, in which the two women not only go toe to toe, but heel to heel, as both are dressed to the nines at a lavish party. Bringing the majority of the film’s comedic relief are Tej (Ludacris) and Roman (Tyrese Gibson), while you have law-abiding badasses portrayed by Kurt Russell (the elusive high-ranking government official known only as Mr. Nobody) and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, who reprises his role as Agent Hobbs.
The main villain, Deckard Shaw, is played brilliantly by Jason Statham. He’s apparently the brother of an international terrorist who Dom’s crew took down in the last film. They thought they were done with the world of espionage until Shaw maliciously begins to pick them off one by one as revenge for his brother. Dom and his crew are forced out of retirement to help the government – a.k.a. Mr. Nobody – track down a missing computer hacker and her frighteningly invasive program called God’s Eye, which has the capability of linking into every cellular phone, security camera and basically any other electronic device you can think of to locate a person. They must find this technology before it falls into the wrong hands (the ruthless Djimon Hounsou) so that Mr. Nobody will help them locate and take down Shaw. Does the plot sound convoluted to you yet? It is, but it isn’t.
Furious 7 moves along at a nice – though sometimes frenzied – pace and the stylized action sequences make it hard to tell who’s who in some of the fight scenes. I found this not only to be an artistic choice, but it was also quite effective at masking whether or not it’s actually Paul Walker or a stand-in during his big fight sequences – and he actually gets in several show-stopping ones, including the climatic bus-over-a-cliff scene. If you’d been living under a rock the past year and didn’t know he’d died during filming, I don’t think you’d have been able to tell, honestly. They did an excellent job of filling in all the gaps (sometimes with the stand-ins and sometimes with the aid of CGI effects from Peter Jackson’s WETA Workshop) and altering the storyline so it doesn’t feel like an incomplete film in the slightest. Truthfully, it feels as if it ends the way it was always meant to end.
I won’t spoil Furious 7’s ending except to say that by the time Wiz Khalifa and Charlie Puth belted out those emotionally driven lyrics to “See You Again,” I thought it was a fitting tribute and respectful farewell to Paul Walker, while allowing the franchise to presumably push forward with more sequels without him. Seeing clips and images from the past six films illustrated how far this franchise has come and just how close the cast and crew have become over the years. The combination of powerful imagery and lyrics (“It’s been a long day without you my friend, and I’ll tell you all about it when I see you again. We’ve come a long way from where we began … Oh, I’ll tell you all about it when I see you again.”) left me once again feeling a bit saddened by Walker’s death.
While he was a far cry from being this generation’s James Dean, any time you see someone die too young it’s a brutal reminder that life can sometimes be too fast and too furious. I also got the impression that Vin Diesel really does feel like he lost a brother and it’s not all just a clever marketing blitz to help the film’s box office – which if my early screening was any indication, I don’t think that box office will need any help. I think The Fast & the Furious fans will be there in droves to pay farewell to Walker. That’s probably what he would’ve wanted. He became iconic in this role. Twenty years from now, I think this franchise will still define his career, and arguably, I think it still defines the action genre of the 2000s.
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