Review – Furious 7

This franchise gets me.

Sure, the pretentious critic part of my brain wants to hate this franchise. The plots are ridiculously convoluted, there is little attempt to ground these films in reality anymore and everything that happens is just an excuse for more car and explosion porn.

But regardless of what that part of my brain thinks, there is another, more primal part of me that wants to see Dwayne Johnson wield a Gatling gun he ripped out of the wreckage of a drone or Kurt Russell putting on night vision sunglasses before unleashing hell or Vin Diesel and Jason Statham charging at each other in slow motion with steel pipes for an epic street fight.

However cynical or mature I’d like to pretend I am, deep inside I want to watch our heroes drive their cars backwards out of a plane hatch so that they can parachute them onto a remote stretch of mountain road in order to ambush a convoy carrying an African warlord. I never knew that’s what I wanted, but damn it if a smile didn’t creep across my face as it happened.

It almost seems beside the point to explain the plot, but in case you are curious, our band of antiheroes find themselves in the crosshairs of Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham), the brother of Owen Shaw, the villain from Furious 6. Owen is still clinging to life, but is in a coma, and Deckard decides to seek revenge for his brother by destroying Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and his crew.

But a straight revenge story would neither be fast, nor furious enough for this franchise. So there is also an entire subplot where Toretto’s team is recruited by a mysterious government agent named Mr. Nobody (Kurt Russell), who wants them to rescue an all-powerful piece of surveillance equipment and the hacker who made it from an African warlord named Jakande (Djimon Hounsou).

At some point, the gang also ends up Abu Dhabi to steal a car containing a very important flash drive (because, in this universe, all important things must be stored inside of race cars). In a movie filled with ridiculously and overly convoluted storylines, this detour is by far the most convoluted, but it also gives us Michelle Rodriguez brawling with MMA fighter Ronda Rousey and Vin Diesel and Paul Walker driving a car through a window of the penthouse of one building and into the building next to it.

The film is over two hours long and yet there isn’t much wasted time in it. It gives you just enough character development to get you invested in the protagonists before moving back to another lavish action sequence. They know that a few brief moments of Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker) telling his wife (Jordana Brewster) he loves her or Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) being sweet to his daughter raises the stakes and get us to care what happens to them.

Speaking of Paul Walker, the film was left with the difficult task of figuring out how to handle his real-life death. While Furious 7 was still in production, Walker died in a car accident. Obviously, that becomes problematic for a franchise that is all about people driving fast cars recklessly with no real consequences. The film actually handles his death quite beautifully though and gives him a rather touching sendoff.

They also had to scramble to finish the film after Walker’s death, since he hadn’t completed filming. They used Walker’s brothers and CGI to fill in the gaps, though it seems like there wasn’t much they had to fill in. There was only one particular scene in a warehouse toward the end of the film where it was noticeable that they were only shooting the character from behind or overhead and there was some obvious CGI in Walker’s final scene, but other than that, they did a fairly seamless job putting it all together.

With Walker’s death, it will be interesting to see what happens to the franchise. Unlike the previous films, there is no post-credit scene teasing the next installment, though they certainly leave enough things open for more movies. (And Helen Mirren has publicly said she wants to be in the next film, which should 100 percent happen.)

I could understand the cast and the producers not wanting to go on without Walker, but if I’m being honest, I hope they find a way to keep going. Because, whether I like to admit it or not, these films get me. And I need more Fast and Furious in my life.

Written by Joel Murphy. If you enjoy his reviews, he also writes a weekly pop culture column called Murphy’s Law, which you can find here. You can contact Joel at murphyslaw@hobotrashcan.com.