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.

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.