Dustin: 3.5 of 5 stars Nick: 3.5 of 5 stars Average: 3.5 of 5 stars (Live canary)
Dustin: Furious 7 is the seventh movie in the Fast and the Furious franchise, just in case you weren’t sure which series this belonged to from the title. It stars Vin Diesel as himself, the Rock as a DSS agent and Paul Walker as a superhero who can deflect bullets and change the length of his hair in every scene.
Nick: ...and they all have the uncanny ability to arrive right when they are needed. And jump from car to car. And Vin Diesel did the most amazing thing I never thought I’d see anyone do in this series: stop at a stop sign.
Dustin: It was all so goofy I was able to forgive a lot. This is the first of these films I actually kind of enjoyed (I’ve only seen Tokyo Drift--hated it!--and Fast & Furious 6--so-so). This film is a bunch of action set pieces sandwiched between scenes that look like they were pulled from a rap video. It’s a lot of fun and feels akin to action films from the ‘90s.
Nick: I’ve seen all of them and the ones I like are the two you’ve seen, the first and the new one. Though 2 Fast 2 Furious is in my most hated films of all time list. No one is saying these films are anything but technically good and fun, but they do cater to their audience of 13-year-olds more than any series ever made. I believe every F&F has rapper cameos by whomever is popular at that time. We got Rita Ora last time and this time Iggy Azalea. I really can’t name one of their songs, but yet I know who they are… sad.
Dustin: I don’t know how this film gets away with so much stupidity and yet gets mostly positive reviews. I think the tone it establishes helps. There’s a scene where Paul Walker runs up the side of a bus as it’s going over a cliff and then leaps to safety. I thought of a scene in the last Hobbit movie where Legolas jumped across pieces of a bridge as they were falling and thought “Yeah, right,” even in a fantasy film. This scene in Furious 7 had me laughing and applauding its ridiculous premise.
Nick: I think the last two have been the most entertaining and that might be because they started to hire martial artists as bit-part actors and brought in Dwayne Johnson who is just phenomenal when playing it up on screen. The last one had Gina Carano and Furious 7 has another female MMA fighter, Ronda Rousey, and my favorite film martial artist, Tony Jaa. Though I wish they would have made Jaa a good guy and have him be their Groot. He only says two words in English throughout the whole film! But placing him as the bad guy and having Paul Walker fight him and get the best of him twice was the hardest part to believe throughout the whole series.
Dustin: It was all so goofy I was able to forgive a lot. This is the first of these films I actually kind of enjoyed (I’ve only seen Tokyo Drift--hated it!--and Fast & Furious 6--so-so). This film is a bunch of action set pieces sandwiched between scenes that look like they were pulled from a rap video. It’s a lot of fun and feels akin to action films from the ‘90s.
Nick: I’ve seen all of them and the ones I like are the two you’ve seen, the first and the new one. Though 2 Fast 2 Furious is in my most hated films of all time list. No one is saying these films are anything but technically good and fun, but they do cater to their audience of 13-year-olds more than any series ever made. I believe every F&F has rapper cameos by whomever is popular at that time. We got Rita Ora last time and this time Iggy Azalea. I really can’t name one of their songs, but yet I know who they are… sad.
Dustin: I don’t know how this film gets away with so much stupidity and yet gets mostly positive reviews. I think the tone it establishes helps. There’s a scene where Paul Walker runs up the side of a bus as it’s going over a cliff and then leaps to safety. I thought of a scene in the last Hobbit movie where Legolas jumped across pieces of a bridge as they were falling and thought “Yeah, right,” even in a fantasy film. This scene in Furious 7 had me laughing and applauding its ridiculous premise.
Nick: I think the last two have been the most entertaining and that might be because they started to hire martial artists as bit-part actors and brought in Dwayne Johnson who is just phenomenal when playing it up on screen. The last one had Gina Carano and Furious 7 has another female MMA fighter, Ronda Rousey, and my favorite film martial artist, Tony Jaa. Though I wish they would have made Jaa a good guy and have him be their Groot. He only says two words in English throughout the whole film! But placing him as the bad guy and having Paul Walker fight him and get the best of him twice was the hardest part to believe throughout the whole series.
Dustin: The film was praised for it’s action cinematography, but I still had problems with how a lot of the fights were captured. Like a lot of movies these days, the fights look very choppy, and feel fake. A steadier hand would actually make these more exciting.
Nick: I don’t think that is necessarily the directing, but the editing. I often complain about that in American films when dealing with fighting. There is so much editing that everything feels faked. The only scenes that weren’t heavily edited were the shots of Jaa, whenever he was winning, and Rousey in the same scenario.
Dustin: At the beginning of the film, you jokingly asked, “Was this directed by Michael Bay?” because pretty much only attractive actors were cast in every roll. This film had other elements that seemed Bay-like: overactive camera and spinning shots of one of a stationary character. But Bay’s films are widely disparaged. They often feel mean-spirited and mindless. How is Furious 7 different?
Nick: The difference, at least in the attractive area, is that F&F7 only cast attractive females while all the men were either buff or jokesters, and all the scenes take place where you could understand there being only attractive women: the beach, a billionaire’s party, Japan (that’s for you). Now in Bay’s film every single goddamn person is gorgeous unless they are obviously there to be the joke, like John Turturro, Ken Jeong and Alan Tudyk, and that’s just in the last one. Also, my favorite part of the Transformers series is when Shia LaBeouf is giving a presentation at Harvard and literally every single student is freakishly attractive, men and women. It doesn’t help that Bay also shoots Victoria Secret commercials and casts models as his main characters.
Dustin: I think part of what makes this movie likeable is that it has a multi-ethnic cast of actors who seem to genuinely like each other team up to defeat evil. People involved seem to understand how silly it all is, but still take it all seriously from a technical point-of-view. How many movies have we seen where it truly seems like no one involved cared?
Nick: Have we reviewed an Adam Sandler film?
I would like to talk about my least favorite part of this film and that is the forced exposition, which is mostly at the beginning and the posturing that happens throughout. There’s so much pointless information being given from one character to another in this film it really drags in the first hour. Mia (Jordana Brewster) is pregnant again, but she doesn’t tell Walker for (insert reason here), which changes three times during the film. Mia tells Dom (Diesel), but if she tells Walker he won’t go risk his life helping kill a special ops agent who has already killed one of their friends. But Mia also says she doesn’t want to force him into a life he hates. Mia is the perfect wife. She is always dressed in a sexy manner, for no reason, and always cares more about what her man wants instead of what’s best for their family.
Nick: Have we reviewed an Adam Sandler film?
I would like to talk about my least favorite part of this film and that is the forced exposition, which is mostly at the beginning and the posturing that happens throughout. There’s so much pointless information being given from one character to another in this film it really drags in the first hour. Mia (Jordana Brewster) is pregnant again, but she doesn’t tell Walker for (insert reason here), which changes three times during the film. Mia tells Dom (Diesel), but if she tells Walker he won’t go risk his life helping kill a special ops agent who has already killed one of their friends. But Mia also says she doesn’t want to force him into a life he hates. Mia is the perfect wife. She is always dressed in a sexy manner, for no reason, and always cares more about what her man wants instead of what’s best for their family.
Dustin: We both laughed at that, because the drama was so contrived.
Nick: There’s so much of that though. The female inspector who works under the Rock, who I don’t recall at all from the previous films, is given a scene where the Rock runs up to her and says, “Here’s your recommendation,” and you’re such a great agent and it is such a pointless back and forth that leads to absolutely nothing. And lets bring back Iggy Azalea! Her scene is after Letty comes back to Race Wars and wins, the camera randomly starts following this white chick, who we’ve never seen, as she walks up to Letty and congratulates her by saying, “Way to go, Ghost Girl!” With the exception of the farewell to Walker at the end, all the dramatic scenes felt so forced. I won’t type about the posturing because it almost happens every second of the goddamn film when there isn’t a car blowing up.
And I realized that we never even mentioned the bad guys (beyond Jaa).
In truth there is so much to laugh at and just sit back and enjoy that we should probably write a Fast and Furious 7 Part 2 Review: Defying Gravity! I’ve wanted this series to be called Defying Gravity since the fourth installment.
Nick: There’s so much of that though. The female inspector who works under the Rock, who I don’t recall at all from the previous films, is given a scene where the Rock runs up to her and says, “Here’s your recommendation,” and you’re such a great agent and it is such a pointless back and forth that leads to absolutely nothing. And lets bring back Iggy Azalea! Her scene is after Letty comes back to Race Wars and wins, the camera randomly starts following this white chick, who we’ve never seen, as she walks up to Letty and congratulates her by saying, “Way to go, Ghost Girl!” With the exception of the farewell to Walker at the end, all the dramatic scenes felt so forced. I won’t type about the posturing because it almost happens every second of the goddamn film when there isn’t a car blowing up.
And I realized that we never even mentioned the bad guys (beyond Jaa).
In truth there is so much to laugh at and just sit back and enjoy that we should probably write a Fast and Furious 7 Part 2 Review: Defying Gravity! I’ve wanted this series to be called Defying Gravity since the fourth installment.
