Fast & Furious 7

It’s been a long road for the Fast & Furious franchise, but for our heroes – now whittled down to the core cast of Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel), Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker), Letty Ortiz (Michelle Rodriguez), Roman Pearce (Tyrese Gibson) and Tej Parker (Chris “Ludacris” Bridges), with Mia Toretto (Jordana Brewster) and Luke Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) getting a handful of scenes – their days of illegal street racing are well behind them.
Remember when this series was all about drag racing? Now it’s not even about high-stakes heists: these guys have all the money and cars and babies and people talking about the importance of family (so much family talk!) they need – now it’s time to settle down. Unfortunately, Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham), has just murdered an entire hospital so he can tell his brother (the bad guy from Fast & Furious 6) that his hospitalisation won’t go un-avenged. It’s one of the all-time great villain introductions, establishing him right from the start as a bad guy that isn’t messing about; it’s kind of a shame then that most of what he does in the actual movie is turn up towards the end of other action sequences to throw a spanner in the works. That’s because despite a lot of hanging around graveyards early on, this film’s real story doesn’t kick in until superspy Mr Nobody (Kurt Russell) pops up to make Toretto a deal: find a hacker named Ramsey (Nathalie Emmanuel) and rescue her from a terrorist warlord (Djimon Hounsou) and he’ll give them free use of the “God’s Eye” tracking software Ramsey will lead them to. With that they can find Shaw before he finds them, problem solved – time to drive a bunch of cars out the back of a still-airborne cargo plane and get this show on the road.
What the Fast & Furious movies do best is provide big crazy action sequences with as little down time between them as possible – well, that and talk about family a lot – and while new director James Wan isn’t quite as slick and polished at it as Justin Lin was, this is still a massively over-the-top action machine that manages the difficult balancing act of being amazingly dumb in just the right way that even smart people can get in on the joke. Even the somewhat mawkish tribute to Paul Walker at the end fits in with the general tone of the movie: it’s like a big tough guy who’s just drunk enough to want to give everyone a hug after he tears down half the house.