Furious 7: Faster and more furious than ever

By Jay Stone

At this stage — that is, seven movies into a franchise that shows no signs of slowing up or even stopping for gas and a pee — it appears there is nothing to do about the Fast and Furious films except to sit back and try to enjoy the ride. The series has evolved from a simple-minded movie about drag racing into an international extravaganza in which cars fall out of airplanes or fly through the air between skyscrapers, leaving behind everything: sense, coherence, believability, but not, it goes without saying, Vin Diesel.

In Furious 7, Diesel is back, looking as dyspeptic as ever. So are many of the other stars including Paul Walker, whose death before the movie was completed does not appear to have appreciably affected his performance. Even the title has been chopped: there’s no time for “Fast” in this souped-up world of violence, revenge and horsepower. Eventually, one imagines, the sheer momentum will blow off all the doors, stripping the title down to “F.”

Furious 7 begins where Furious 6 left off; that is, in mid-race. Jason Statham — helping beef up an ever-growing cast of action stars — returns as Deckard Shaw, a fierce villain (“a British special forces assassin,” someone explains) who’s after the F&F crew for harming his brother in the previous movie. In an opening sequence notable for the unlikeliness of its choreographed mayhem, Statham faces off against Dwayne Johnson, the improbably be-muscled hunk who also returns as Hobbs, a Los Angeles policeman. Their fight is a montage of styles: the karate kid against the ex-wrestler, with a few large handguns and some portable bombs thrown in for sheer exuberance.

Meanwhile, back in the cars, Diesel’s Dom reunites his crew to find Shaw, which you wouldn’t think would be much of a problem since Shaw is in fact trying to find him. Nevertheless, the only thing to do is to rescue a computer expert who has been kidnapped by a sort of free-floating terrorist — the subplots in Furious 7 come as quickly and furiously as the cars — and hack into the world’s many security cameras to track Shaw down.

This involves an endless parade of automobiles that are variously wrecked, parachuted out of planes, sent soaring through the sky and occasionally just driven down the road. Things stop occasionally so Dom can express his emotional commitment to his crew — “I believe in you. I believe in us. That’s all that matters,” he might say — while tending to Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) who has been suffering amnesia since about F4, and growling his approval of Brian (Walker) who in the interim has married and had a family. The movie keeps telling us this is the most important thing, usually just before it roars off to more pyrotechnics.

Of special interest is Walker’s performance, apparently put together with bits of film shot before he died, stunt doubles, his lookalike brother and a few computer tricks. It’s a seamless concoction, helped along by the fact that the entire film is so utterly disjointed that you’re eventually prepared to accept just about anything.

Director James Wan, who helped invent the Saw franchise and therefore knows a thing or two about disjointed, assembles a crazy quilt of gunfire, fistfights and road rage, interrupted with a few highlight sequences. These include a chase down a lonely highway in which the boys have to stop an armoured bus, and a caper in Abu Dhabi that involves wrecking a multi-million dollar Lykan Hypersport automobile by driving it through several windows in an office tower.

The crowd cheers. Vin Diesel glowers. At almost 2½ hours it isn’t exactly fast, but it’s as furious as hell.

-30-