Given that I was probably the last person on the planet who cares about this movie to see it, maybe I'm a little too late with the review. But I enjoyed Furious 7 quite a bit, and I'm not done thinking about it yet, so bear with me. While everyone goes to these movies for the absurd action sequences, they stay for the characters. No one watches them for the stories, because the plots are thinner than Vin Diesl's hair.
Back in screenwriting class, we learned about "thematic statements." There's one line of dialog, usually in act one, that tells you what this movie is about. In Batman Begins it's, "It's not who you are underneath. It's what you do that defines you." In The Amazing Spider-Man it's the question, "Who are you?" And in Furious 7 it's, "Cars don't fly." It's an argument that the movie then goes on to subvert at literally every opportunity.
I deliberately picked comic book movies as examples, because let's be honest, The Fast & The Furious movies have more in common with those than, say, Rush. To borrow the famous tagline from Richard Donner's Superman, "You'll believe a car can fly." Seriously, the cars in Furious 7 spend almost as much time in the air as they do on the street. Not that I'm complaining.
Okay, maybe the cars don't fly thing is just a running joke and real theme is, "The only thing that matters is family." The sad thing is, this family is shrinking. In Fast and Furious 6 we lost Gisele (Gal Gadot) and the awesomely named Han Seoul-Oh (Sung Kang). Unlike the other movies in the franchise, I think the word funeral (as in, "No more funerals") is said more than "family." We also know that series lead Paul Walker died in a car crash before they were done filming and that this movie is a farewell and tribute to him. They give his character a touching sendoff, but it means that if the franchise continues we've seen the last of Brian and Mia (Jordana Brewster).
Fast 5 and Fast & Furious 6 had large casts for action movies. There's a scene in Furious 7 where Dom (Vin Diesel) and his team are standing around a Microsoft PixelSense table sketching out a plan of attack and I thought, "It's so empty. Where is everyone?" Then I remembered. Whether it's a picnic table, a dining room table, or a state-of-the-art computer table, there's nothing sadder than an vacant place. And scene wasn't even remotely about that!
All this hit me pretty hard. The last evening I spent with my dad before he passed away was the night of Paul Walker's crash. With more elderly relatives than school-age, my family is shrinking too. And for all the talk I was seeing on the screen of, "I don't have friends. I got family," there I was sitting alone in a mostly empty movie theater on a dreary Thursday morning. My second entertainment outing in a month that I went to solo.
Now please don't feel sorry for me. My life is what it is, and there's good stuff too. Just like there's good stuff happening to the Fast & Furious family, with Brian and Mia's son Jack and a little girl on the way. But the joys and challenges of leaving the single life behind to raise a family aren't something I can connect to, though maybe some of you reading this can. The point that I'm trying to make here is that anyone with even a moment of life experience is going to find something to connect with in this story. And for a franchise that's often considered more thrill ride and mindless entertainment than anything, that says something.
Getting back to the action, it is glorious. When your movie has Vin Diesel, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, Jason Statham, and small roles for martial arts legend Tony Jaa and MMA superstar "Rowdy" Ronda Rousey, it better have glorious action. Obviously, it's not just vehicular mayhem anymore. For example, at some point Dom had time to study Filipino stick fighting... with wrenches. With all those fights come the sorts of deadpan lines only someone with gravitas of Diesel can say. "The thing about street fights... the street always wins." Then he stomps his boot and the asphalt beneath his enemy crumbles. Yep.
Everyone was wondering about how they'd tastefully say goodbye to Paul Walker's character. Brian had already been set up with a family and our heroes lead dangerous lives, so it was pretty easy to write him out of the series. But the way they showed it was simple, and simply perfect. And you can see it in the official music video.
Did it live up to all of my expectations? You betcha! Was it the best of all the movies? No, I think the sixth installment was a little better. Nevertheless, Furious 7 is a ridiculous and yet strangely touching action movie. If they keep making them (and I'm sure they will), I hope they can find new ways to build the family and maintain the values that have made this franchise so darn endearing.
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