I haven’t looked forward to/dreaded a movie so much since Watchmen. Given the circumstances of the flick, how can it not be effed-up?
I’m a car guy. It runs in my family. My POS college car went kerblooey and as luck would have it, my younger brother picks up the local paper (yes, this took place a long long time ago at a place far far away) and sees there’s a ‘69 Charger for sale. The ‘69? The best of the masterpiece second generation Chargers? Don’t shit me, Dipshit.
So I’ve had the car since then—longer than many of you reading this post have been alive, which is depressingly inconvenient for my long-term plans. And yes, it absolutely tickles the shit out of me often the second gen Charger is used in movies, TV, and commercials today. Oh, and the USPS stamp.
So the Fast & Furious franchise has been car guy stupid fun for me. We don’t expect miracles when we see these movies, we want entertainment. And the franchise has delivered. We’ve mainly got Justin Lin to thank, since he directed installments 4, 5, and 6; because the series has increased in quality. How many franchises can say they’ve done that for their runs? Star Trek had a misfire every other flick (and Star Trek 2.0 is right on track emulating), Alien 3 was a face plant, Cars 2 plus Cars proves Pixar doesn’t walk on water; and here are the F&F flicks getting better. (Given the uber-low starting point, lots of room for improvement—point admitted.)
It’s been cited countless times and I state the obvious—the movies have struck a chord for what the concept of “family” can envelope. A diverse group of people that are not buds, but mi familia as they put it. These slam-bang/smash-everything-in-sight movies have heart. They’re pure commercial products rolling cash to Universal with tsunamis, but there’s chemistry between the actors. How their stories have been handled over the years seems a window to lives all of us wish we had. Given the formulaic boredom of all the goddam Save The Cat! scripts Hollywood chickenshits us with, these stories manage to hold some humanity despite the ludicrous wrecks and action.
So now we have F7 with James Wan taking the wheel. Mr. Wan checks off the F&F bullets: coming up with as many hypercars to fill the screen as possible, the slomo grinding of the women’s (barely) clad bums at the car meets, the Latin music, the Charger rearing up on its axle, the babe who starts the drag race, Japanese tech toy versus all-American muscle car—boxes...checked.
And then Mr. Wan goes JJ Abrams-mode with over-the-top stunts. (“The Enterprise under water? Hah! We’re skydiving cars!”) You seen the trailers and thankfully it’s not completely revealed in the freebies. While that old old skydiving car commercial exists, I’d swear my bottom dollar that the sequence is flat-out homage of Brock Sampson skydiving his ‘69 Dodge Charger into the Monarch’s lair in the The Venture Bros. pilot episode. Seriously. How is F7 not paying homage to Brock’s Charger? And yes, the fact that the Charger was the first one diving off the plane puts me at 11 on the smug-o-meter. On the other hand, cars using round chutes means to me the cars couldn’t’ve been controlled to their touchdowns—WTF was that all about? Why didn’t they use those ram-air chutes for the sequence? Meanwhile the CGI of the cars flipping thru the air as the characters go apeshit is so nutty-plus, you can’t help being swept up by the sheer bizarreness of it all.
I’ve ripped into the third Christopher Nolan Bat-flick. I just see a boring cut-and-paste from the first two movies, so why anyone gives it anything above mediocre reviews; I don’t see it. So here’s Furious 7 and in a sense, the action well has dried up too. The movie also has a superduper digital chip as its macguffin. This movie also has a big action sequence involving the car just making it out of a collapsing concrete structure. So yes, it’s looking copy-and-pasty in the F&F world too. Not a good sign.
And then there’s the awfulness of Paul Walker dead and how it happened. Halfway thru production, could they salvage the franchise? I have my choices of which scenes had his brothers standing in for Mr. Walker or were CGIed, so we’ll see if I whiffed or not.
Where do you go with Mr. Walker’s character? Killing him off would have made perfect plot sense, but holy crap; talk about ultimate bad taste. What the director, the writers, and Universal did to address the situation works as well as you could hope. I could see no easy way for them to address the issue and be tasteful, but damn if everyone didn’t come thru. Kudos to all involved. Vin Diesel’s narration during those final moments was bittersweet and hit the mark exactly—I can’t imagine it being handled any better.
Mr. Wan took over the franchise after a long run and surmounted obstacle after obstacle to get it completed. For sheer creative effort in itself to make the best out of a bad situation, he hit it out of the ballpark. Altho I’m sure it’ll tire quickly, Mr. Wan makes use of the camera doing a quick rotation about its axis when something slam-bang happens—like putting someone thru a glass table. The shot is used here to great effect—worked fantastic for him to incorporate to the extent he did. He’s got his signature.
On the editing front, not so much. It’s all machine gun ultra-quick cuts where I swear they are trying to beat Armageddon for sheer number of unnecessary quick cuts. Yes, this is grumpy old Charger Guy as I use my walker to get to the car. I just see lots of choppiness means the director isn’t sure enough to let his scenes and actors play out longer sequences against each other. Zardoz, can’t the quick cutting be reserved for slam-bang sequences?
And yes, for me it’s Charger Porno—go to movies simply because they involve second gen Chargers. Even crap as Plan 9 From Outer Space-awful as Drive Angry—I’m there. And F7 delivers the mostest Chargers yet—the knobby-tired skydiving ‘70, the glossy black ‘70, and the pristine ‘68. Was I in car heaven? (I also imagine the Universal execs screaming, “Don’t you goddam dare put a goddam General Lee ‘69 in the movie! Warner Brothers can goddam eat shit before we goddam do that!”)
And if had my druthers, I wish another actor was introduced as Brian’s brother, so he’d be perfectly slotted for F&F 8. Stephen Amell, the Green Arrow, would’ve been a completely believable choice. As it stands I see a hole in bad need of filling, but that’s why they’re in Hollywood and I’m just pissing in a blog.
Furious 7 covers a lot of old ground to wrap things up. That is no small accomplishment and I salute them for their bang-up job well done. But now that Paul Walker is gone, maybe they can take a step back from the CGIed ludicrous world of virtual cars and go with a realistic physics Bullitt approach to the scenes. Maybe Generation Cyberbator feels differently, but CGIed scenes anymore for me are boring as hell. A schmuck at an Intel workstation renders 10,000 virtual zombies instead of 100 actual extras in the shot—so what? The CGI is so boring, I’ll take the randomness of real life—just like how Steve McQueen overshot that one street in Bullitt and had to back up with wheel hop galore—the mistake stayed in the movie and it’s better because of it. I want more of that anymore—not realism, but realistic.
