Rough but so ready
Latest instalment of popular franchise a fitting commemoration of Paul Walker’s shining talent
SOMETIMES parting company with a friend is as simple as reaching a fork in the road. When Paul Walker, one of the rapidly growing roster of stars of the Fast & Furious franchise, died in a high-speed crash just over a year ago, there was widespread shock at the news of his death.
Walker died during the making of Fast & Furious 7; the film was completed with help from his two younger brothers, Caleb and Cody, and some subtle, unobtrusive computer graphics. Ghouls hoping to spot the joins will be disappointed.
Only in a martial-arts brawl in a warehouse in the film’s final act are the use of a body double and tactical shadows conspicuous, and there are at least five more pressing reasons than those that the scene is hard to follow. But as a commemoration of his talent – being able to shine like a brilliant-cut gemstone the moment he climbs behind a steering wheel – the film does him justice.
In a gut-twisting mid-film car chase through the mountains of Azerbaijan, we see his character, FBI agent Brian O’Conner, tightropewalk across the roof of a bus as it teeters on a crumbling cliff-edge.
The film cuts away to another scene of Vin Diesel and Jason Statham careering through a forest driving muscle cars like dodgems, but you wish the camera had stayed with Walker, and allowed him to complete the stunt without allowing us pause for breath. Even low-born, trash cinema like this can cheat time and beat death. That’s the movies’ single greatest power, and why I found myself unexpectedly shedding a tear at the film’s perfectly judged, sunbathed, final fade.
But few people (Green Party members?) go to Fast & Furious films to cry. They go, as the title suggests, for loud cars and bad tempers, of which this seventh instalment delivers plenty – and perhaps a little too many. At 2¼ hours, Fast & Furious 7 is long and lumpy, and expectations that a new director – James Wan, recruited from the relatively cheap Saw and Insidious horror series – might bring a Roger Corman-like efficiency to the franchise go mostly unmet.
What Wan does understand, though, is what made the earlier movies internationally successful, and how to replicate it. Just as the early James Bond films allowed cinemagoers passage to foreign countries in the 1960s and 1970s, so the Fast & Furious films do with foreign street cultures. (The first film was based around Walker’s character’s infiltration of an illegal Los Angeles drag-racing syndicate.) Where the fifth film had Brazil and the sixth London, the seventh decamps to Abu Dhabi, for the purpose of locating a computer chip, The God’s Eye, that Dominic Toretto (Diesel) and the gang are trying to locate, while occasionally swatting off Jason Statham’s murderous villain.
Or at least, that’s what the script says. The real point of their visit, of course, is to ogle the country’s finely tuned, outrageously expensive supercars – and then drive them, very fastly and furiously, over dunes and out of windows. The film is a daypass to a dream lifestyle, with all the gold furniture, white tuxedos and bronzed bottoms that entails. And unlike Bond, its characters, like excon playboy Roman Pearce (Tyrese Gibson) and ace mechanic Tej Parker (Chris “Ludacris” Bridges), aren’t too cool to savour it.
This cast has snowballed with every film and give the film an organic, multiracial appeal that studios probably spend tens of thousands trying to manufacture in other franchises.
I’ve always enjoyed the idea of the Fast & Furious films more than their execution, but this feels like the series’ strongest, even though some of its action sequences are so muddled they can barely walk straight.
But for each of those moments, there are two more that work. Walker’s bus-roof scramble, for instance; or the scene in which a £2.3-million (R56.4-million) cherry-red Lykan HyperSport jumps between the three Etihad Towers, and everything – vehicle, driver, window-shards, audience – remains silently suspended in mid-air for what feels like minutes.
You couldn’t mistake this for polished blockbuster filmmaking: perhaps if you could, it wouldn’t be Fast & Furious. But it speaks straight to your adrenal glands, and for the most part, the conversation flows. – The Telegraph