Lucas Versantvoort / April 14, 2015
If there’s anything that would haunt this film, it’s the death of series mainstay Paul
Walker. Though it’s been probably ten years since I last saw one of these
films, I decided to see this seventh entry out of curiosity: how would they
handle Walker’s death? Would it profoundly affect the movie’s premise? The
answer is yes, but mostly no. Furious 7
never devolves into a trauermarsch of
sorts and that’s probably a good thing as drama was never this series’ strong
suit.
Like I said, I didn’t
see some of the previous entries in the series, but the film is very watchable
even so. So basically, some guy, Deckard Shaw, is pissed that the main crew
hurt his brother, Owen, and he wants his revenge. He kills one of them,
off-screen mind you, and puts another in the hospital and blows up Dominic’s
home, though no one dies. This spurs the crew into action. But wait, there’s
more. Turns out a group of secret government agents led by Mr. Nobody (Kurt
Russell) are after a super-duper hacking device called God’s Eye, that hacks
every possible camera in the world to constantly narrow down a person’s
location. A hacker known as Ramsey developed it and is captured by a Somalian
terrorist, Mose Jakande (Djimon Hounsou). Mr. Nobody makes a deal with the
crew: help him retrieve God’s Eye and they can use it to pinpoint Deckard
Shaw’s location. But wait, there’s more! There’s also a subplot involving Letty
and Dom’s relationship. She suffers from amnesia and, though he’s a teddy bear
towards her, she has doubts about how this’ll affect their relationship. But
wait….there’s more!! There’s another subplot involving Brian (Paul Walker)
struggling to adapt to being a minivan-driving dad: he misses the bullets and
all that.
Man, I don’t think the
film could be anymore jam-packed with drama in between all the tits and ass and
fancy cars. And therein lies the rub: the film tries too much with only
moderate success. The inevitable result is that most of the drama feels like an
afterthought. This ironically affects Brian’s storyline the most, though you’d
think—this being his last appearance—they’d pull out all the dramatic stops on
this one. No, the storyline that receives the most attention is Letty and Dom’s
relationship, but despite Vin Diesel and Michelle Rodriguez’s valiant efforts,
it’s hard to care since it doesn’t affect the main storyline. There’s never a
sense of danger of one of them dying or any of the others for that matter.
This leads us to the
action, which is mostly pretty good, but, like I said, suffers from a lack of
tension. Anyone watching this series knows it’s all about insane stunts and so
on which is fine as it allows for scenes like a car flying from one skyscraper
to the next, but you’ll not find any real tension here.
This, again, leads us
to the villain, Deckard, and the same problem applies here. Because the action
never generates a sense of dread, of you genuinely fearing for the characters’
lives, Deckard loses his potency as well. Not to mention the fact that, due to
the gargantuan amount of plot, he rears his head less and less as the film goes
on. He’s at least more potent a villain than Jakande, who spends most of his
time barking orders through his bleached goatee. Forgettable doesn’t even begin
to describe it.
Yet, despite all my
whining, the film has its moments. Some of the action is pretty fun to watch
and there’s some good comic relief, not to mention a nicely symbolic tribute to
Walker at the end. Despite all my complaints about the story, I gotta hand it
to them: at least they didn’t take the cheap route and integrate Walker’s death
into the narrative. Can you imagine if Brian had died midway and we’d get shots
of the crew sobbing and what not? Not even a 0 to 100 in 3 seconds sports car would
top the speed at which my respect for the series would drop. Anyway, for better
and for worse, Furious 7’s got it
all. If you don’t go in expecting Walker’s death to change the series into
something it’s not and never will be and instead expect something akin to a
summary of what’s made the series so popular you’ll probably have a good time.
Plus, Kurt Russell absolutely dominates as Mr. Nobody, so there’s that too.
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