The Fate of the Furious

Year: 2017
Genre: Action
Directed: F. Gary Gray
Stars: Vin Diesel, Dwayne Johnson, Jason Statham, Michelle Rodriguez, Tyrese Gibson, Ludacris, Charlize Theron, Kurt Russell, Nathalie Emmanuel, Scott Eastwood, Luke Evans, Elsa Pataky, Kristofer Hivju
Production: Universal Pictures

The Fast and the Furious franchise (2001-Present) has been a bit of a sticking point for me over the years. In many ways I admire it for being an outright parody of itself while still maintaining its stone-face veneer - fronted of course by Vin Diesel: the least interesting action hero since Rick Hill. Yet every time I see Dominic "Famaly" Torreto jump head first out of a speeding car and onto concrete and live, I can't help but long for the days when these character archetypes were nothing more than Point Break (1991) riffs with faster cars.

Seriously, can you give this guy some keys to play with?

To be honest, I do not like this series. I don't like that it has taken all the, by comparison, harmless sex, cars and chauvinism of the first three movies and calibrated those elements into a super concise, soulless and  frightfully cynical machine shucking materialism and bling-bling tribalism. At the center of this beast is not the need to tell an interesting story - to be honest it's not even about giving audiences high quality action either. This series now exists as a means to its own end. It exists because Vin Diesel, Dwayne Johnson, Michelle Rodriguez and Tyrese "I do absolutely nothing of consequence" Gibson need it to.

Keep in mind when that stick comes out there's no telling how much bulls**t is coming

But for the sake of audiences who don't know or care that their being duped, I won't go into nit-picky details on Fate of the Furious's questionable physics. I won't call out the plot which at eight movies in is starting to resemble Swiss Cheese with the amount of plot holes. I won't question the bad acting, the terrible character choices, the dubious themes nor will I continue to point out that being able to drive cars good, is not a good enough reason to recruit an aggressively diverse group of pseudo-criminals for a world-saving challenge. I will graciously take that big, wide stick I got up my a** and try to meet this movie half way.

Fate of the Furious takes place shortly after the events of Furious 7: Furious and Furiouser (2015), just as Dom and a recovered amnesiac Letty (Rodriguez) are getting the hang of their hip Cuban honeymoon. After the obligatory street race through Havana, Dom rendezvous with notorious super-hacker and three movie retcon Cypher (Theron) who turns him against his "famirlehr" for the sake of global domination (and something about a crocodile). Mr. Nobody (Russell) then retools Dom's team - adding 7th movie baddy Deckard Shaw (Statham) because of reasons - so they can all hunt him down and find out what Cypher is really up to.

For immediate, unbiased cultural comparison, Fate of the Furious is not as good as Fast Five (2011) but not as bad as Tokyo Drift (2006) (which to me is like asking which poison I'd prefer drinking but, whatever). The action sequences are unique and bombastic enough to sustain regular fans of the series while being just on the cusp of unbelievably and super-unbelievably for causal fans to not say, "did The Rock just Dr. Strangelove (1964) a f***ing torpedo?" The supposed zombie-cars that Cypher conscripts is an especially nice techno-phobic touch allowing audiences to easily enjoy the film's signature scene while still playing with their iPhone during the movie - completely unaware of the irony.

Seriously, she looks like she swallowed a goldfish

Yet there's a certain deceased actor's shadow that looms large in this film; a shadow that the movie acknowledges but in a way that only draws attention to the series' larger re-calibrations. It seemed obvious after the series used up its "law versus lovable rogue" tropes that it was going to foist its narrative flag behind Johnson's Hobbs character. Johnson, after all, has become a much more successful and marketable action star than the croaky, permanently sleepy Diesel. Diesel and the belated Walker would have remained the brotherly spiritual center, but every time a super-villain who looks like they're swallowing something still wriggling in their mouth ever shows up, Hobbs would be the one to track everyone down. Then Paul Walker died.

As it turns out Walker's rather white bread Brian O'Connor was actually holding a lot of this series together; either as a source of undiluted exposition, an audience POV and/or a focal point of F&F's themes of brotherhood and "feeamerler". Without him earnestly trying to keep up with the team or casually eye-f***ing Vin Diesel, Fate of the Furious works in parts but never as a cohesive whole.

I just don't know how to quit you bro!

I suppose we should all be thankful that series producers didn't turn around and retool the series like they did when they first realized there was franchise potential. Instead they uneasily passed the baton and will be chugging along on their laurels until either Statham's Shaw bromances the crap out of Hobbs or Scott Eastwood has more star power than being known as the last nameless soldier to die in Suicide Squad (2015). Personally I would have taken the franchise out back and smacked it repeatedly with a tire iron a long time ago. Unfortunately nothing truly dies anymore.

Final Grade: D