You may, like me, have seen all of the Fast and Furious movies, and you may, like me, have enjoyed most or many of them. You may also, like me, have a hard time remembering exactly what happened in each film. You needn’t worry. The franchise’s Wikipedia page is filled with bare-bones yet surprisingly descriptive sentences like these: “Roman manages to anchor his car to the tank, which Brian then pushes over a bridge, flipping the tank.” Ah, yes — the old anchoring-the-car-to-the-tank-and-then-pushing-it-over-the-bridge trick, from 2013’s Fast & Furious 6. How quickly we forget! Could anything in any subsequent Fast and Furious movie — say, Furious 7 — ever top it?
The good news is that Furious 7 offers more — and more, and yet more — of the same. The series prides itself on scaling grander heights of craziness each time, and that’s part of what fans love about it: The 1,001 instances of shock-absorber abuse in Furious 7 include, but are not limited to, pinwheel turns executed inside an Abu Dhabi skyscraper and a rather sweet ode to one of the series’ great grandpappies, The Italian Job, in which a long, squarish bus-like vehicle perches delicately on the brink of oblivion, almost taking with it one of the series’ central characters, the late Paul Walker’s Brian O’Conner.
Dizzying stuff happens in Furious 7, and there are probably more instances of airborne cars than in any other single movie in the series. There’s something marvelously freeing about watching objects that were meant to hug the road soar through the heavens. Plus, these brief moments of floating freedom are a respite from the film’s predictably ADD-choppy editing, a hallmark, sadly, of nearly all action movies today.
Yet the pace is so aggressively frenetic that it might lull you into a sort of Zen state, as it did me. Like its forebears, this movie — directed by junior horror kingpin James Wan (The Conjuring), taking the gearshift from Justin Lin (director of movies three to six) — has a characteristically throwaway plot, with a few new faces thrown in. Jason Statham swaggers around as Deckard Shaw, a nasty British special-ops guy out to avenge the death of his brother, vanquished in the last movie. A Fast and Furious picture always needs an extra stone fox or two, and flirty-flinty Nathalie Emmanuel plays one here. (Her character is a hot hacker.) A suave, suit-wearing Kurt Russell pops in from nowhere — his entrance is one of the movie’s grandest, most pleasurable jokes — to reassemble Brian O’Conner’s old gang for, you know, one last job.
But this Furious 7 is more poignant than any other action movie in modern memory, for the simple reason that this really will be Brian’s one last job. Walker was filming Furious 7 when he was killed in a car crash in November 2013, and his presence in the finished film is palpable, despite the fact that Wan had to use doubles (including Walker’s two younger brothers) to complete the shoot. And no matter how zany and over-the-top the action details get, the series’ core characters — introduced in that first exhilarating surprise hit, The Fast and the Furious, made fourteen years ago — have always been its lifeblood.
Most of those characters — the ones who haven’t been killed off, at least — are here: One of the franchise’s more recent additions, Dwayne Johnson’s Agent Hobbs, has a marvelous moment in which he wields a gigantic automatic weapon as if it were a leaf blower. Vin Diesel’s Dominic Toretto is back, too: In his trademark white waffle-knit shirt, he looks like a hip Mr. Clean. Michelle Rodriguez’s amnesiac Letty, Ludacris’s brainy-silly Tej and Tyrese Gibson’s charming grandstander Roman remember things, make wisecracks and try to run the show, respectively.
For all the full-throttle dazzle, though, the best scenes are the quietest ones, in which these characters make observations about love, life and family that would seem overcooked in any other movie. In a tense moment, when Statham’s villainous Shaw tries to foist that old “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” bromide on Toretto, the latter responds, with Diesel-icious calmness, “I don’t have friends. I have family.”