The Fate of the Furious

The Fate of the Furious. F. Gary Gray. 2017. ⚂

Oh, this is directed by the guy that did Men in Black: International? That wasn’t… very good? I mean, it wasn’t a disaster or anything, but…

[ten minutes pass]

Wow, that’s how you do an action movie opening. Driving around, explosions, evil bad guys…

[ten minutes pass]

Well, in the previous episodes I mean movies, there’s often at least been a hand-wavey thing about the heroes not killing an excessive amount of innocent bystanders… like in the… hm… one of them… where they explained that it was OK to kill all those cops because they were corrupt. But here they’re just blowing up an entire city? And using a wrecking ball on the cops? I mean, that’s a fun gag, but are these people complete psychopaths now?

[half an hour passes]

There’s so much… plot… in here. The previous ones were fun heist movies, and that really worked. This one has so much going on, and very little of it is entertaining. People standing around, talking about things that aren’t very interesting. Dom’s a father now, and the kid has been kidnapped and OH GOD MAKE IT STOP

[ten minutes pass]

HELEN FUCKING MIRREN!!!1!

What budget did this have, anyway?

Oh, right…

Nice gross. It also explains why these movies are happening mostly outside of the US, I guess…

Anyway, it’s also disappointing how much they rely on CGI here. Much of the fun of the previous movies had been the excitement of the driving… but when it’s just a swarm of badly-animated CGI cars, it’s just… meh…

Practical stunts are always more fun to watch than CGI.

[the end]

The fun scenes in here are so much fun that they almost overshadow the hours and hours and hours of sheer tedium. But only almost.

The scenes with Mirren and Statham are totally cool, and most of the other characters get to have a scene or two where they do their bits, and that’s all good. But the movie, as a whole, just doesn’t work. I mean, even cutting out half an hour of boring exposition wouldn’t really have helped that much, I think? It’s just a plot that doesn’t quite work.

And man, all that CGI fire… I guess they thought they had CGI fire perfected in 2017, but it’s mostly “oh, there’s more CGI fire” now. Everything’s on fire, because they could just drop some CGI in, and that just cheapens it…

But the twist (you know the one) had me laughing out loud, because I just didn’t expect it.