As a Target of Vengeance, This Road Crew is Ready with its Engines Revving

From left: Tyrese Gibson, Michelle Rodriguez, Paul Walker, and Chris Bridges in "Furious 7"

You really have to hand it to the “Fast and the Furious” series for making it this far.  Who would have thought that the original film from 2001 would gain this much popularity and eventually reach a seventh installment?  I certainly didn’t.  When you think that these movies have already been coming out over a span of 14 years, it’s actually quite impressive.  

As the series goes on, you just have to embrace the fact that the car stunts are going to become more and more over-the-top, requesting that you accept these films for the fun ridiculousness that they are.

In director James Wan’s “Furious 7,” he continues the trend of the films one-upping each other in the high levels of enjoyable absurdity that this franchise can muster, thereby creating the most out-of-control and crazy installment to date.

Following the events of “Fast and Furious 6,” the villainous Owen Shaw (Luke Evans) is left in a coma after his confrontation with Dom Toretto (Vin Diesel), Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker), and their crew, prompting Owen’s assassin brother, Deckard (Jason Statham), to set out for revenge.  Before Dom and his group can take down Deckard, however, they are asked by a secret-ops leader (Kurt Russell) to obtain a computer-hacking program known as the God’s Eye and save its creator (Nathalie Emmanuel) from mercenary Mose Jakande (Djimon Hounsou).  If they accomplish this, Dom and his group will be allowed to use this coveted hacking tool to track down Deckard.  This will lead them on a globe-trotting mission that will prove to be more dangerous than anything they have dealt with before.

It goes without saying that you don’t go to these movies for the acting, and while the performances are passable, there isn’t much to them.  However, a positive you can say about the cast is that their chemistry is as strong as it was when this series first began.

Seeing as Jason Statham is one of today’s modern action-movie stars, I was hoping for there to be a little more to his antagonistic role.  I know this series doesn’t prioritize in writing layered characters, but I wish Statham had a little more included in his part.  Except for a couple of scenes where he has some dialogue, he usually just shows up on screen to continue his rampage against Dom and his crew, and then leaves until he’s ready to appear again.

The screenplay by Chris Morgan, who has written all of the films in this series since “The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift,” mainly just has the crew going from location to location in order to set up the next big action sequence.  What you have to understand about the stories in this series is that the writers know that factors such as characters and decent narratives come second to the action scenes.  While that is something I’m normally against, this series has built its reputation on these sequences and acknowledges how unapologetically and gleefully preposterous it all is.

“Furious 7” marks the final film appearance by Paul Walker, after his passing in November 2013, and the movie does a moving tribute to him in the film’s final scene, one that really expresses the deep friendship between Walker and Diesel’s characters.  In a series that was never really required to have much emotion in its stories, this sequence adds a refreshingly good deal of it.

Although most of director Wan’s filmography has dealt heavily in the horror genre, he shows that he doesn’t have any problem handling an action film as big as this.  Wan fully delivers on the spectacle in the film’s three big set pieces, especially in the final showdown in Los Angeles, which actually manages to top the fun absurdity of the climactic runway scene in “Fast and Furious 6.”

At this point, it’s difficult to tell how many more entries in this franchise we’ll be getting.  The brotherly connection between Walker and Diesel is the center of these movies, and because “2 Fast 2 Furious” only had Walker and “Tokyo Drift” had neither of them (except for Diesel’s cameo at the end of the latter), those two installments ended up being my least favorites, so I’m not sure how an eighth film will fare without Walker.  Although it would be best to finish the series with “Furious 7,” the film’s ending sets up the franchise for another sequel, which is set for an April 2017 release.  At this point, I guess all we can do is wait and see where the series can go from here.

After this franchise brought the main group back together for the fourth installment, which was the first time that was done since the original, a lot of my excitement for these movies returned.  I’ve certainly been enjoying this series ever since, but I think it will very soon be time to put this franchise in park.

Final grade: B