I've been trying to think about how many film franchises stay viable by the time they get to the seventh in the series, let alone how many franchises continue on with the same cast and continue to be better with each in the series, let alone have the seventh film make 140 million dollars in its opening weekend. I guess it's all about family. But what the Fast & Furious movies have been able to do is pretty remarkable, especially considering how many of the factors that go into conventional filmmaking are notably absent, namely plot, character development, a script, etc. I suppose the audience for these films, starting with the first in 2001, doesn't care so much for character development as long as Vin Diesel throws on a white tank top while prowling around car races amidst girls in bikinis and gleaming rice rockets with their hoods up. However, nearly 15 years and 6 films later, nothing has changed but how much money they're bringing in. I want to say they are creatively advancing but I don't think that's quite accurate. The set pieces are becoming larger and more extravagant, the directing becoming sharper and slicker, the costars becoming bigger and bigger, both literally and figuratively, but in a sense, they've become simplified, boiled down to the leanest, meanest, cleanest thing they can think of. You could watch these movies with the sound off and not miss a beat. The scenes of dialogue in 7 are the same they were in the first, mini monologues on porches and balconies praising street values like loyalty to friends, family, toughness and cars. The draw is the cars and the choreographed scenes of carnage and mayhem inflicted upon the streets of just about every city in the world. There is no subtlety or subtext to anything going on in these films, it's all about watching Vin Diesel fight The Rock, or Vin Diesel fight Jason Statham, or in the case of Fast & Furious 6, which includes a bit of a tongue in cheek gag that has the bad guy putting together a crew that is the funhouse mirror version of our beloved crew, Vin Diesel's Dom and The Rock's Agent Hobbs standing side by hulking side in a tag team match versus Luke Evans as Shaw, the British mercenary and his giant sidekick Klaus. It's something you could imagine seeing in a WWE ring but in this case, it's in a giant cargo plane that is in the midst of crash landing on seemingly the longest runway ever made. The filmmakers know what we want to see. These films are the last of a dying breed; dumb, big budgeted, overblown, larger than life blockbuster crowd-pleasers.
Furious 7 opens with a boner-inducing scene for action film lovers in which we see Deckard Shaw, played by Jason Statham ... exactly the way Jason Statham plays every character, in a hospital room telling his comatose brother Owen Shaw that he will find Dom Toretto and his crew and avenge him. As Shaw leaves the room, we see that he has wreaked havoc on the hospital and turned it into a war zone in order to gain access to his brother, under heavy guard due to his actions in Fast 6. After blowing up the Toretto-O'Conner home in Los Angeles directly after blowing up Han in Tokyo (who left the crew to go back home after the death of his girlfriend Giselle, the stunning Gal Gadot, soon to be seen in the new Batman movie as Wonder Woman), Shaw sets out for the crew. Described as a ghost, Shaw is working with an African warlord to procure a device known as God's Eye which is capable of spying on any and every citizen in ways that would make every Whole Foods liberal in Berkeley's head explode. The bulk of the film sees the crew protecting a (for some reason incredibly hot) hacker named Ramsey who is trying to both acquire and hack into the God's Eye program to plant a virus and deactivate it. Kurt Russell appears as Mr. Nobody, the head of the shadow organization responsible for developing the God's Eye program who, for reasons not quite made entirely clear, needs Dom and his crew to track it down after it has been stolen. From there, we see Vin Diesel and Paul Walker drive a super car (which, for some reason, has no brakes) from one skyscraper to another to yet another in Abu Dabi, Vin Diesel making an entire parking garage crumble with a stomp of his foot, The Rock flexing his biceps and breaking a cast off of his arm, The Rock shooting down a helicopter with a gatling gun he took off of a drone that he crashed by jumping an ambulance off a bridge into, The Rock saying the line, "Woman, I am the cavalry," and various other amazing gravity and logic defying feats of strength and cunning. Walking out of the theater, you feel like you need to pick a fight or Tokyo drift out of the parking lot; all of the testosterone and bare knuckle brawling makes a guy feel a little extra kick in his step. There is a great scene (repeated verbatim later in the film!) where Diesel and Statham face each other in their respective vehicles, pure American muscle and slick European sportscar, and play a game of chicken where neither of them blinks and end up smashing head on into each other. Another scene has Vin in yet another suped-up muscle car that he drove out of an airplane and parachute-landed on a mountain road as he faces about a dozen henchmen vehicles and gunmen in odd black masks and instead of shooting his way out or trying something crazy and elaborate, he simply just drives off the cliff and crashes to the foot of the canyon. That's it. It's yet another example of the simplified choices they make, you're expecting something crazy but what ends up happening is the most basic yet ridiculous thing you could think of.
What I really liked about 7 is the melding of a few different styles that James Wan brought into this film. A veteran of the kind of horror films I generally don't go for (Saw, The Conjuring), Wan's only real action film directing experience is the 2007 Kevin Bacon film Death Sentence, which was pretty decent. The last few films have been crisscrossing the globe, from Rio to the DR, to Spain and England, to the Middle East and back to where it all began in Los Angeles, which was actually kind of nice to see, as the climax of 7 was the crew zipping around the streets of LA with choppers, drones and Jason Statham after them at every turn. But with Wan comes an eye for foreign talent, which brings in the likes of Statham and Tony Jaa, legendary badasses in their own corner of the world, not to mention Ronda Rousey and Kurt Russell. This newest installment is the most of something else that we've seen in the series so far; one part kinetic close-quarters Asian martial arts film, one part Mission: Impossible-style globe-trotting high tech thriller, one part American muscle action film. I am much more interested in seeing this kind of thing, trying to catch homages and influences, marveling at the sheer delightful absurdity of it all, than trying to poke holes in the plot, which seems to be the big knock from non-fans, which is a tired debate. I found it immensely delightful to see Kurt Russell in a suit cracking jokes and trying to give Vin Diesel a Corona, and then later on, having him go old-school Kurt Russell and start picking off henchmen in a warehouse like he's done it a thousand times. It's impossible to not want to stand up and cheer any time The Rock comes on screen (although he is mostly absent from 7, just one heavyweight match with Statham in the first act and then his triumphant return during the climactic LA battle which involved the aforementioned drone, ambulance, broken cast, etc.) because he makes Diesel look like little more than an overgrown kid. Some non-action flourishes added to the film in an attempt to add dramatic tension involve the completion of the Lettie-has-amnesia storyline and a subplot involving the late Paul Walker's Brian lamenting the fact that fatherhood involves a lack of bullets and explosions. The final scene is a touching if slightly confusing tribute to Paul Walker involving a Vin Diesel voice-over and a montage of the best of Walker. I don't know where the series will go from here, however the semi-cliffhanger ending leaves plenty of avenues to explore and since two of the main characters have died in the last two films and one of the main actors has died in real life, they will either have to bring in some new blood or continue on with who they still have and create another dynamic of some kind.
No comments:
Post a Comment