Now This is Zooming: F9

It’s now common knowledge that the Fast & Furious series has become something of a superheroic fantasy. It began as a simple street racing thriller. Now this is a group of films in which multiple people have had perilous falls safely broken by the hood of a car, and a rollover accident down the side of a mountain rarely amounts to more than a brief need to shake your head and carry on. It’s a tangle of call backs and retcons, a comic book soap opera of knotty gearhead melodrama and splash panel surprises. It’s gone so far and away over the top that it’s still there even as it dips ever so slightly back to just plain over the top. That at their best they remain legible mission movies — a diverse ensemble of heroes assemble to go to the place and fight the guys to get the things before the countdown clock reaches zero — is part of their charm. The latest is F9, and it manages to be super satisfying on both levels, even if it’s no threat to the title of franchise best. (Maybe the fact this big crowd-pleasing spectacle will be the first such picture for many a vaccinated audience member this summer will help ease that distinction.) The whole endeavor has proven to be a sturdy, well-oiled machine. We get the thrills, personalities, effects, and stunts you’d expect as the gang gathers to once again drive real fast to save the world from nefarious international baddies bent on messing stuff up for everyone real bad or something. It’s nice to see them again, and in a movie a little more worthy than the last couple. The series once again balances its complicatedly simple plotting with earnest Hallmark card sentiment, genuine affection for its characters, and old fashioned serial cliffhanger motivations. It’s a good time, if you can grin at the sight of a car swinging across a chasm on a rope stuck to its front tire or deploying an enormous electromagnet or rocketing into the air on a jet engine. It’s the ninth one. Aren’t you ready for that by now?

Par for the course the movie takes our usual players — Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez, Tyrese, Ludacris, Jordana Brewster, Nathalie Emmanuel — and returning recurring supporting players and adds a striking woman (Anna Sawai) and muscle man (John Cena) and cameos (fresh and familiar) to scurry around a new glowing gizmo MacGuffin. It also brings in an estranged sibling heretofore unmentioned and a scene from six movies back gets retconned for the second time. But it’s all for the sake of the fast paced action ramped up and amped up with careening variables and whiz-bang complications. So it’s just plain fun. The outsized action is capably staged by returning director Justin Lin, responsible for most of the series’ high points thus far, who lets the movie in on the grinning joke and satisfaction without letting it get too self-amused. It’s just as often letting characters shake their heads at where they’ve ended up as we might be in the audience. Lin knows what the fans want is a story that delivers on genuine affection for its family of friends who make up our plucky heroes, and sends them through their paces making cars do things they never could. He also provides some flashbacks — a number throughout, and they’re aptly more a textural piece with the series’ earliest entries — to smooth over belated connective tissue and ground the characters’ self-awareness to understand the escalation their lives and talents have undergone without ever quite puncturing the reality, so to speak. It’s all just too fast to have time for anything but good times. It careens past its sometimes-dodgy exposition with high spirits and smash-bang, thrillingly ridiculous action craft. Unlike, say, the sometimes overly schematic Marvel movies, this is a series that matches its characters’ sense of flying by the seat of their pants and making it up as they go along, improbably surviving. That they keep getting away with it is a huge part of the fun.

Vroom Vroom Kaboom: FURIOUS SEVEN

The Fast & Furious series continues to drift into hyperbole, finding in Furious Seven its most ridiculous entry yet. It is 137 minutes of improbable vehicular chaos, pausing only to reiterate its core cast’s affection for one another. The series began as modest, loosely connected heist/street-racing pictures before arriving in its fifth and sixth installments at a perfect blend of heightened automotive action – dragging a two-ton safe through Rio; racing a tank down an elevated highway – and sincere lunkhead melodrama playing off the reassembled ensemble’s family dynamic. Sure, cars went flying and the plots became tangled webs of backstory. But the brotherly bond that built up between Paul Walker and Vin Diesel, and the chummy affection amongst the whole diverse gang (Michelle Rodriguez, Tyrese Gibson, Ludacris, Jordana Brewster) anchored the fast, often clever, action in good feelings.

Now here we are, seven films deep, and the series’ usual screenwriter Chris Morgan continues the typical pattern of sequel escalation, adding new characters and heightening the stakes. This time, a resourceful evil British assassin (Jason Statham) is hunting our team of drivers. See, they burned his villainous brother (Luke Evans) in Furious 6, so he wants to make sure they blow up real good. It’s a revenge plot, and the blood runs quickly. One teammate is killed, as teased in the previous installment’s credits. Their best frenemy (Dwayne Johnson) is hospitalized. And then Dom (Diesel) barely escapes with his life when his house is bombed. This means war, and a different kind of action movie than this series has been.

Instead of spending their time drag racing or heisting, though they do each for a scene, the gang decides to work with a mysterious military man (Kurt Russell). He offers them help defeating their new enemy in exchange for finding a MacGuffin held by a hacker (Nathalie Emmanuel) who has been kidnapped by a terrorist (Djimon Hounsou) and his henchman (Tony Jaa). What follows is a blitz of violence and movement, in sequences that feature such sights as: cars parachuting out of a plane, two people surviving a rollover accident down a mountain, a sports car careening safely between skyscrapers, and a climax involving a helicopter, a drone, a supercomputer, crumbling buildings, and a bajillion bullets that wouldn’t look out of place in the third act of any superhero movie.

Fast & Furious movies are no stranger to the absurd, the dubious, the gleefully stupid, and the charmingly outsized. But Furious Seven is the most mostness of all of them. It’s chockablock with exotic locales, roaring engines, bruising hand-to-hand combat, convenient technological assists, last-second escapes, huge explosions, and lasciviously objectified women in bikinis. It’s amped up, and trying hard to be. Perhaps it’s the influence of the director, James Wan, taking over from Justin Lin, who had directed the last four entries. Wan, he of Saw and The Conjuring in his first non-horror effort, seems extra sure to hit the required elements of a F&F film hard, leaving the audience happy to have received not just what they’d hoped to see, but so much of it at once.

Instead of building with each scene, Seven is all exhausting crescendo. A few times, the movie tipped over into exasperated monotony, often leaving me worn out, eyes rolling. The action sequences aren’t as infectiously exciting. The movie basically admits it, with the “don’t try this at home” disclaimer buried deep in the credits instead of prominently displayed. (At least the characters are at one point worried about a concussion.) The loud, silly action is the series’ biggest and craziest, sometimes entertaining, but hardly the most satisfying. I idly wondered if the filmmakers hoped to stun an audience with an overdose of exaggerated mayhem into forgetting the action’s just not as clever or memorably staged this time. In fact, the fistfights are better than the car chases. And who goes to one of these excited to see the punching?

Yet, when I managed to shake off my doubts, I found myself enjoying the ride more than not. This is a perpetual motion machine manipulating the audience with jolts of adrenaline and sensation. It’s scattered, characters appearing and disappearing when required for an action beat (Brewster gets less screen time than the product placement for Corona and Abu Dhabi), and emotional threads loosely strung (flashbacks flashing by to get teary-eyed about the past). But all this overstuffed muchness is in service of a thunderous series finale feeling rolling over the film. This finality is partially due to star Paul Walker’s untimely death mid-shoot, his unfilmed scenes finished with effects, doubles, and old footage, the ending doubling as a sweetly mawkish tribute. But it is also partially for the way the film gathers up familiar faces, events, and vehicles from throughout the franchise for what these characters (and Universal’s marketing) call “one last ride.” I doubt it will be, but I don’t know how much further over the top they can go.

Souped-up: FURIOUS 6

The Fast & Furious movies are some kind of modern Hollywood wonder: a scrappy franchise built improbably out of humble B-movie origins into one of the most popular and most reliably entertaining series currently running. From its origin in 2001 as a modest B-movie that was an appealing reworking of Point Break that swapped SoCal surfing for street racing, through two largely free-standing follow-ups that drifted away from the central premise, the series has shown a resilient capacity for trial and error and confident course correction. Producer Neal H. Moritz, who has been around since the beginning, and director Justin Lin, who has made four of these in a row now, have been unafraid to try new things – new locales, new characters, new hooks – while keeping what works and ditching what doesn’t. The series finally hit upon the exact right combination with 2011’s Fast Five, a satisfying fast car spectacle of a heist picture that pulled in all the best aspects of the previous four films to casually create the kind of multi-picture mythology Marvel worked so hard to build leading up to The Avengers. It’s all the more appealing for feeling serendipitous, the product of continual underdog status.

The franchise’s growth continues in Furious 6, which is once again bigger and better than anything that’s come before. The series has been honed once again. This time the exposition is tighter, the emotional arcs are crisper, and the action set pieces are more outrageous and insanely gripping. The plot’s as ludicrous as ever, but it makes perfect sense on its own terms. The single-minded agent played by Dwayne Johnson, sweat and muscle personified, hunts a crew of drivers led by a mysterious new villain (Luke Evans) and a mysteriously returning face (Michelle Rodriguez), striking military targets throughout Europe. He decides the only people who can help him capture these bad guys are the very drivers who stole a massive safe out from under his watch in Rio and who he’s sworn to bring to justice. He seeks out their leader (Vin Diesel) and offers to wipe the criminal records clean if he’ll get the gang back together to help Interpol stop these villains. It takes a team of drivers to stop a team of drivers, or so the logic of these movies goes.

Diesel agrees, and so the whole family of series regulars – Paul Walker, Jordana Brewster, Tyrese Gibson, Ludacris, Sung Kang, and Gal Gadot – comes flying in from all corners of the world to participate in this globetrotting film in which the good guys chase the bad guys through sensational sequences of vehicular mayhem. New to the group is Johnson’s second-in-command, played by Haywire’s Gina Carano, proving in only her second major role that she’s the best action star on the planet. She’s just as hyper-competent and self-assured as the cast, which otherwise joins the chase already crackling with charming chemistry carried over from last time. The group has grown to be terrifically appealing and refreshingly causally diverse. And they’re easy to root for. It’s funny how a series in which all of the leads are so very good at their jobs (and progressively richer for it) can maintain their underdog status. But that’s a key to the films’ success. There’s always a sense that they’re one wrong step away from prison and one wrong turn of the wheel away from death. Keeping Johnson close this time is a good way to keep the threat of the law alive, while Evans provides the most purely threatening villain the series has had yet.

As screenwriter Chris Morgan studiously finds the series loose plot threads that I hadn’t realized existed, pulling the whole initially haphazard enterprise into something of a beautifully retconned coherence, director Lin offers up scenes like an early chase through London streets in which the bad guys have souped-up racecars built with angled armored plates that allow them to hit a police car head on and send it spinning through the air while they zoom away unscathed. It’s an encouraging sign that six movies in there are still new fun, exciting ways to send cars smashing. Later, a spectacular sequence will grow to include helicopters, motorcycles, and one tough tank. And if you thought Fast Five’s extended sequence of two cars dragging a two-ton safe through city streets was something, wait until you see what happens with a cargo plane here! Just when I thought the film was stalling out, it finds another gear. I shouldn’t have doubted.

I haven’t always liked this franchise. It first appeared when I wrongly thought its car chase simplicity was beneath my burgeoning cinephilia, but Fast Five was so entertaining it prompted me to revisit them all in the run up to Furious 6. Doing so, my opinion of them improved (somewhat) and served to reinforce how successfully the filmmakers responsible have gotten the potential out of even the lowest points of the franchise – for me the dull, table-clearing and setting fourth effort – and pulled it all together into a coherent whole. The series has only ever promised dumb fun with fast cars and some minor cops-and-robbers intrigue. Now that it has figured out how to deliver all that as well as gripping heist plotting, satisfying fan-service, unexpectedly emotional arcs, bruising hand-to-hand combat, and gleefully, absurdly, joyfully over-the-top action, I figure this series is downright unstoppable. Furious 6 is not only the best one yet, it’s sequence for sequence up there with the most enjoyable action movies in recent memory.

Note: Be sure to stick around for the rewarding scene in the middle of the end credits that features a killer surprise cameo and a tease of more Fast & Furious to come.

Vroom Vroom: FAST FIVE

I don’t recall enjoying any of the previous Fast and the Furious movies, those four oddly named films that provided an excuse for fast cars and manly scowls. But still I showed up at Fast Five with something close to anticipation for I’ve found that this is the rare franchise that can get me kind of excited each time around, as if all those hours spent gazing in apathy at cars zooming around in their dumb little plots were somehow not as bad as I remember. At this point, ten years removed from the first movie, I’m starting to think I should rewatch them all to see if I’d like them any better now. What strange effect the allure of these movies has on my memory and judgment.

It is to my surprise, then, that I didn’t altogether dislike Fast Five. Director Justin Lin (working from a script by Chris Morgan) does a good job of juggling the massive, bloated 130-minute runtime by staging some exciting action sequences and not lingering all too long on the labyrinthine character histories. I thought I was in trouble, though, just a few minutes in. I’m not up on the ins and outs of the Fast and Furious mythology. I couldn’t tell you in too great of detail what even happened in some of the installments let alone how exactly all the characters know each other. When the movie opens with Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) sentenced to prison and promptly escaping with the help of his sister (Jordana Brewster) and her boyfriend (Paul Walker) and then follows that up with a lot of talk about events past, I had a hard time keeping up. Soon enough, though, the movie swept me up in its preposterousness when a car is pulled out of a moving train and speeds across the desert.

Of course, Fast Five is about paying off the fans’ knowledge of the series and about bringing back as many characters from old installments as possible. It kind of feels like a reunion with personalities I didn’t even know I missed because I didn’t think they were enjoyable the first time. In every scene it’s clear that this is a movie that likes its characters as much as I'd imagine fans do (part of what makes me a bit curious to revisit the earlier movies). After a long-winded first act, the movie introduces the need to bring in Tyrese Gibson and Ludacris (unseen since 2 Fast 2 Furious), Sung Kang (from Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift) and Gal Gadot (from Fast & Furious) to help with that hoary old criminal plot: the “one last job.” Yes, after four movies of flirting with a heist plot, Fast Five just goes right on ahead and commits to it. That’s just what this series has been looking for all this time.

Despite the large ensemble, this isn’t about the people. It’s about the plot. It hardly matters who the participants are. As one character says to another, about an upcoming robbery, “I need an extra body.” This isn’t a movie about character; really, this is a movie about careening, about bodies in motion, spinning vehicles and live ammunition down city streets. It’s about slamming through ridiculous close calls and making tight, fast turns through narrow spaces, about pulling off daring robberies in broad daylight with maximum destruction but minimal collateral damage. I kid! With a movie this fast and furious there’s nothing minimal about it, especially when, in its climactic slam-bang heist, two cars are dragging a ten-ton safe down a busy street in the middle of Rio de Janeiro.

Where the movie most succeeds, in my estimation, is its introduction of Dwayne Johnson, continuing his long-awaited reentering into the action genre after last fall’s surprisingly entertaining – and bluntly efficient – Faster (no relation to this series). His blocky, muscled charisma is channeled into an all-business roughness and gruff determination playing a law-enforcement agent who arrives in Rio on Toretto’s trail. He’s a sweaty, hulking piece of overheated machismo that moves right up to the precipice of parody without falling over. (When Johnson and Diesel finally clash in a battle of the sweaty muscles, its some kind of tough-guy showdown that feels much sprightlier than, say, last year’s wax museum of Stallone’s Expendables).

Johnson commands a group of indistinguishable underlings just as effortlessly as he commands the screen. He makes the most out of every line given to him in a movie where most characters are lucky when they get more than a dozen words to say at any one time. In fact, he seems to be the only character that knows just how much sense the movie makes. “You know what makes sense?” he asks an inquisitive underling. To answer his own question, he rips the case files out of her hand and tosses them to the floor.

Even though I found much to enjoy, I still felt like I was sitting at a remove from the movie. I admired the stunt work and the general air of straight-faced ridiculousness, and the last twenty or thirty minutes or so are a nice piece of sustained action filmmaking, but I never really felt completely comfortable. Maybe because it was building on a foundation that was mostly forgotten to me, or maybe because it’s strange tone (its very somber about its silliness) was so weirdly wobbly I never fell into the right groove. Still, I had my pulse raised or a goofy smile provoked (sometimes both at once) just enough times that I can’t be too hard on it.