Fast and furious date with fate
Eighth street-racing outing more like ‘Mad Max on ice’
(6) FAST & FURIOUS 8. Directed by: F Gary Gray. Starring: Vin Diesel, Dwayne Johnson, Jason Statham, Michelle Rodriguez, Charlize Theron. Reviewed by: Robbie Collin.
WE may never know if anyone on the set of Fast & Furious 8 ever actually said the words “Mad Max on ice” aloud, but at least half of them must have been thinking it.
It’s the only way to describe the big finish of this latest outing in Universal’s unstoppable street-racing series, which sends Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and his team tearing across a Russian ice floe in a pick ‘n’ mix fleet of performance vehicles while bad-guy trucks erupt in flames behind them.
It’s the most entertaining action sequence in the film but it also indicates how this hitherto forward-thinking franchise has found itself on the back foot.
Since the slate-wiping fourth instalment in 2009, Fast & Furious films have been the place to go for quick-cut, shakily shot, CGIsmothered cartoon excess that just happens to involve cars – and they’re invariably propelled across the finish line, if and when they are, by their outsize sense of fun and likeable ensemble cast.
The fact that the franchise hadn’t produced a single comprehensibly shot and edited car chase in the last eight years was by-the-by – or at least it was, until Mad Max: Fury Road (and others, not least of all the John Wick films) reminded us just how exhilarating this stuff can be when done right.
Hence, perhaps, the sheepishfeeling tribute to George Miller’s film with which Fast & Furious 8 rounds things up. It’s like watching the child with the biggest mouth in school suddenly realise he has to walk the walk – and managing, just about, though in a way that makes it slightly harder to look him in the eye afterwards.
Director F Gary Gray commits the sequence to a Fury Road level of spectacle and has some uproarious ideas up his sleeve.
But its craftsmanship doesn’t step up to the challenge: speed and distance are often poorly expressed, like the could-have-been-ingenious scene in which the vehicles of New York City turn sentient, Herbie-style (it’s to do with the microchips), then chase the Russian ambassador and his nuclear launch codes around Manhattan.
The idea itself is crunchy fresh and its implicit suspicion of driverless cars feels deeply on-brand. But there’s something musty in the execution – too much visual clutter, no real sense of peril, and computer graphics that don’t quite square with the surroundings. It’s an odd sensation to watch a Fast & Furious film and find yourself wishing the special effects lived up to the writing, but – well, here we are.
And here, for the most part, they all are too: Diesel’s Toretto, his new wife and long-serving crew-mate Letty (Michelle Rodriguez), Dwayne Johnson’s diplomatic security agent Luke Hobbs, Tyrese Gibson’s quip-happy Roman Pierce, Chris “Ludacris” Bridges’ level-headed mechanic.
The notable absentee is the late Paul Walker, and though his character Brian O’Conner is sweetly eulogised, his space on the team is unsentimentally plugged by Scott Eastwood’s preppy, blue-eyed law-enforcement type.
Jason Statham makes a welcome return as British special forces veteran and “tea and crumpets-eating sumbitch” Deckard Shaw. When he and Hobbs aren’t bickering, he’s often left to do his own Statham-y thing: no other member of the Fast & Furious cast, for instance, could have pulled off the scene in which the actor rids a jumbo jet of henchmen with one hand while the other – well, again, this one’s probably better experienced than explained.
Helen Mirren has a cameo as Deckard’s mother and is somehow better served than poor Charlize Theron, whose flaxen-haired super-hacker Cipher spends her scenes waxing gnomic on the subject of fate, peering at Toretto and generally doing anything but driving or hacking.
In Fast & Furious 8, Theron is hissing orders at underlings and growling lines like “it’s zombie time”. It isn’t – not quite – but one sympathises. – The Telegraph