Furious7. James Wan. 2015. ⚄

Oh, this isn’t by Lin? Oh right, he had to sit this one out while doing Star Wars Beyond…

It continues on from the sixth movie very closely, so I wonder whether he was involved anyway.

[an hour passes]

OH MY GOD. This may be the best action movie ever! It’s so much fun, and it’s so funny! The action scenes are just unbelievable! Like they should be! It’s like “oh yeah… those Bond movies were much too realistic…”

But it’s not just that the action is so incredible, but it’s all so… good-natured. It goes from one “whoo!” scene to a “yay!” scene to an “ooooh!” scene. I love it.

Best movie in the franchise, I think. Well, at least so far; still an hour to fuck things up.

[the end]

Watching this was so enjoyable. It’s one action scene after another, and they’re all so audacious that it makes me laugh out loud at the silliness of it all. There’s so much heart here, and it’s so charming… And of course, there’s cars hitting helicopters.

CARS HITTING HELICOPTERS.

I think this may be the best action movie ever.

But it’s not perfect. There’s, like, five minutes of boring exposition that could have been dropped. But it’s pretty darn near perfection. I mean, for its genre.

Fast & Furious 6. Justin Lin. 2013. ⚃

[three quarters of an hour pass]

It’s… it’s got a fun plot? Intrigue and espionage and stuff; it’s the most high-class plot so far. But I think it’s slightly… scattered? The previous movie was a lot of fun, and this tries to hard to be equally fun, but it’s not quite hitting it, I think.

There’s some scenes that feel really dates, like the scene where Hobbs beats up the car thief in custody and the cops are going “Is that legal?” “No, but are you going to stop him?” and then smirking… I guess 2013 was the peak of the “good guys torture bad guys” thing popularised by 24…

And now they’re repeating it with the … guy that’s giving them the cars…

But… it’s got a lot of charm. It’s hard to stay annoyed.

[half an hour passes]

This is a lot of fun, but there’s boring scenes in here that could have been cut. I don’t mean the ones where Vin tries to get his amnesiac girlfriend (who now works for The Enemy (yes, indeed)), but the ones where the men stand around talking to each other portentously.

[the end]

I thought they had reached the limits of absurd action scenes with the tank-on-the-highway thing, but then they topped it with the cars v. plane scene! Fabulous!

But it’s not a perfect movie. They could have cut down… like… fifteen minutes of flab? That’s not a lot. It’s almost The Greatest Action Movie Ever, but it’s not. But it could have been.

I like that it leans into the serial nature of these movies… hard. I don’t think anybody watching this isn’t going I WANT TO SEE THE NEXT MOVIE.

Fast Five. Justin Lin. 2011. ⚄

Oh deer. Another Justin Lin take of The Fast and the Furious.

Oh fuuuuuck! Lin does them all from now on out, except number seven? Hollywood is so unadventurous — he’d delivered two F&F movies that (one of them vaguely) made money, so he gets to own the franchise?

OK, I guess that paid off here, with the studio taking in several hundred M…

Perhaps this’ll be a good one, then? 50% bigger budget than the last one.

[half an hour passes]

Well, there was a fun action scene, but now it’s all… The Rock flirting with a cop in Brazil. I don’t know why, exactly.

[ten minutes pass]

My standard joke about character development in movies is “You’re not my father! You were never then when I grew up! *development achieved*” Guess what just happened here:

That’s a variation, at least…

But this F&F movie is the best since the first one. At least so far — it’s got a good heist thing going on, and all the gang’s together again…

[an hour or so passes]

This is such a good-natured movie! Finally they’ve got the chemistry back from the first movie after a streak of movies that were difficult to care about. This one also has got a lot more and more fun action than the previous movies, so it’s no wonder that it’d go on to gross 2x the previous movie and 4x the one before that. Lin is coming into his own, balancing out the scenes a lot better: You can actually tell what’s going on, even when there’s a lot of action.

[the end]

This was what I imagined one of these movies would be like! It’s fun! It’s exciting! It’s got a heist plot!

I think this may be the best movie in the series, so far. (I.e., it’s perhaps better than the first one? And the three other ones are execrable, so…)