Furious 7

First, for the first hour I was pretty much at sea as a host of characters was introduced who meant nothing to me. I may have seen the original Fast and Furious (I just don’t recall), but I didn’t see two through six, and there seems to have been a ton of back story. Marriages, deaths, a woman who has lost her memory. It’s like trying to watch the fifth Harry Potter movie without seeing any of the preceding films.

But that’s really academic, because the first hour is all I saw. At the end of the first really, really big action scene we bailed out. I was amazed at how bored I was by it all. I kept thinking, if we make movies any dumber than this one, we will need a whole new vocabulary of dumbness. Moronic, idiotic, brain-dead … none of those really begin to communicate the supreme stupidity of every element of this stinker. One reviewer put it succinctly: “Here is a film in which nothing is at stake.” How true. When no one can get badly hurt, there is no tension. Slam through a dozen plate glass barriers (impossible!) during a fistfight, crash through the glass outer wall and fall eight stories to land on the roof of a car … broken collarbone, one broken leg. No blood, no bruises on the face. Deliberately drive your car off a cliff, fall who-knows-how-many feet onto solid rock, tumble side-to-side and end-over-end thirty or forty times until nothing about your car resembles a car … and crawl out at the bottom, completely uninjured. This is the realm of pathetic invulnerable superhero movies, not movies about human beings we’re supposed to care about.

These people have no plans, other than a fairly original (and probably impossible, but never mind that) idea of how to deliver five cars to a twisting mountain road and then pursue a bus and a lot of SUVs bristling with machine guns. No plan, just drive into the hail of lead and count on your perfect luck to never be hurt, never even cut by flying glass. (Oh, sure, one guy says something about bulletproof glass. Ain’t no such thing, sucker! A .50-caliber bullet will rip through any glass like cellophane.) Who cares? Not me.

The one thing you can say is there is some impressive stunt driving, and they claimed there was minimal use of greenscreens and cars in studios, and I believe them. But who cares? Not me.