The latest installment of the Fast & Furious series roars to success—Furious 7 already earned $143 million during its opening weekend. Here is a film that doesn’t have super heroes or witches and wizards, and the cars don’t transform into talking robots. Instead, we have the fierce roar of Dom Toretto propelling his supercar from the 47th floor of one building onto the 35th of the next; and its just as awesome as it sounds.
Vin Diesel predicted that Furious 7 would win Best Picture at the Oscars next year, “unless the Oscars don’t want to be relevant ever.” This prophecy may not come to fruition, and while it is still early in the year, Furious 7 easily deserves the title of Most Entertaining Film of the Year.
It was 14 years ago when the original The Fast and the Furious was released. Since then, six sequels later, as characters have come and gone, the fundamental theme has remained constant: family above all. This is exemplified with Dom’s “I have no friends… only family” line in Furious 7. The gang is a core group that transcends race, gender and ethnicity— a utopian ideal of the perfect team.
But what really brings audiences to this franchise every two or three years is the high-octane action and massive set pieces compounded with the bombastic wiz of vehicular combat. Furious 7 is no exception to the proven formula. Cars fly out of airplanes, mini-guns spit led at attack helicopters and fist-fights are perfectly blended to mix up the combat.
Jason Statham and Djimon Hounsou are the film’s two villains with Statham taking center stage. His character, Deckard Shaw, is here to extract vengeance on Toretto and his team for harming his younger brother. Toretto is then convinced by super-secret agent, Mr. Nobody (Kurt Russel), to rescue a hacker from whom they can borrow “God’s eye”, NSA’s dream for a surveillance device, to track and find Deckard Shaw. The plot is convoluted and doesn’t make much sense— but the movie accepts this and disregards it for pure and classic entertainment tied together with meaningful themes of brotherhood and loyalty.
The Fast & Furious franchise has been a speeding rocket constantly attempting to up the ante and re-define the action film. Furious 7 is the sonic boom that has propelled it into one of the most successful films in history; it garnered the 4th best opening weekend in history.
One final note will be made on the film’s closing scenes. All audience members will be struck with melancholy whenever Paul Walker is on screen. His tragic death during the middle of production nearly ended the franchise. However, the writers and director James Wan were able to create a beautiful tribute and sendoff for the late actor. After all of the laughter and ohs and ahs, the audience grew quiet silent in the final sequence the exemplified the film’s core theme – family can transcend blood and your brother is whoever stayed by your side no matter how ferocious the ride.
