Furious 7 (2/10)

by Tony Medley

Runtime 139 minutes.

Not for children.

This is a cockamamie amalgamation of absurd car chases, even more ridiculous fights, and more noise than you can tolerate blasting away at you for almost 2 ½ hours. The story makes no sense. There’s absolutely no plot, and what the filmmakers thought might pass for a plot, the pursuit of a McGuffin in the form of a computer memory card, is completely forgotten at the end.

Let’s be frank, here. One of the stars, Paul Walker, died in a car accident halfway through the movie. So director James Wan and writer Chris Morgan furiously (no pun intended) set to work to save what they had in the can. The result is this mish-mash that is totally incoherent.

I’m not sure why people will like to see car chases that are beyond ridiculous, stunts that defy credibility, and fights that would kill someone after a minute that go on for 10-15 minutes with deadly blows absorbed with no effect whatsoever. But that’s what they get here and it will probably reap big profits. But 139 minutes of this is enough to drive any reasonable person batty.

Then there’s the acting. Acting? I didn’t see any acting. We don’t need no stinkin’ acting! Let’s face it, when you put Vin Diesel and Ludacris and Jason Statham together in the same film, you’re not going to confuse them with Laurence Olivier or Paul Newman or Marlon Brando. Unfortunately, in this thing you don’t even get Donald Duck. But there’s not much even Olivier could do with lines like:

Woman (in distress)

Did you bring the Cavalry?

Dwayne Johnson (carrying a full machine gun)

Lady, I am the Cavalry.

Oh, boy is that ever funny. The only problem is that I answered her question with the exact same line before Dwayne did, as did, I’m confident, most of the audience.

It’s too bad that Walker died at such a young age, and there’s a nice tribute to him at the end. But a better tribute to him would have been to scrap what they had done before his accident and start over with a clean script and story and produce a movie of reasonable length that has some plot, story line, character development, and raison d’être other than loud noise, silly fights, and ludicrous car chases.