The Fate of the Furious

Surprisingly enough, I’m pretty sure this is the first movie in the series I ever watched from beginning to end. I didn’t see any of the movies until they had been out for a while. I can remember buying my dad this movie on DVD before I got him the series collection. We just decided to watch this one day without either of us having seen the previous movies. As you can imagine, neither of us really had any idea what was going on. I knew some stuff about the series. I know I had watched reviews of all the movies on YouTube. None of that really helped though. Looking back on it, I’m sure this was a key motivator for me sitting down and watching the whole series. I wanted to make sure I knew everything that was in the series. I’m glad I did that.

The Fate of the Furious starts off with Dom and Letty on their honeymoon in Cuba. While Dom is walking up the street one day, he notices a woman having trouble with her car. As he helps her, she reveals that she knows who he is and was there on purpose. She shows him something that puts him in a precarious situation. The next day, Dom and his crew are recruited by Hobbs to steal an EMP device on an off-the-books mission. On orders from this mysterious woman, Dom goes rogue by sabotaging his team and stealing the device. The mysterious woman is later revealed to be Cipher (Charlize Theron), a cyberterrorist once thought to be a myth. In order to take her down and bring back Dom, the team is recruited by Mr. Nobody and his new associate, Little Nobody (Scott Eastwood). Begrudgingly, they must also work with Deckard Shaw, who is brought on by Mr. Nobody.

While I normally like to start off talking about the tings I like, I’m going to start with the things that bug me about this movie. First off, things in this movie tend to happen just because they’re supposed to happen. I realize I probably just described this whole franchise, but it gets pretty noticeable with this movie. For starters, there’s a scene where Dom is shown sneaking away from Cipher’s view to have a secret meeting. He says he only needs five minutes. With how much is going on, it’s pretty clear that whole sequence would’ve taken him much longer than the five minutes it supposedly took. Secondly, there’s a lot of high-tech jargon thrown out in the dialogue. I’m no computer expert, but I’m pretty sure most of what Tej and Ramsey say is compete nonsense. All of it seems to work, somehow. Having said that, there is a fun moment that shows Ramsey and Cipher going back and forth to take control of the submarine remotely, all while realizing what the other is doing and speaking as if they’re in the room together.

My second biggest gripe with this movie is how they handle some of the characters, most notably, Cipher. It’s stated that she is this cyber super genius who is in complete control of everything. It certainly seems that way for the majority of the movie. You see how she can control just about anything through her programs and networks. As the movie goes on, she starts to appear much more unhinged and careless. Things start to get pass her that don’t seem like they should. It gets established that Cipher was the one to hire Owen Shaw to steal the Night Shade device. However, I feel like Owen Shaw is much more in control of the situations in his movie, Fast and Furious 6. The only time you see Owen not have the upper hand on everyone is at the very end. Other than that, everything happens because he wills it. That’s not the case with Cipher. If she’s this super genius orchestrating the events in these different movies, shouldn’t she be in control the entire time also? This kind of goes along with my first point: Cipher fails in the end because the plot requires it.

At this point in the franchise, all of the characters are written to act out their established archetype. Tej and Ramsey are the tech experts, Roman is the one-liner spitting comic relief, Hobbs is the tough and witty good guy, so on and so forth. It’s a shame the franchise starts to focus on character development less and less. I realize it’s hard to do with a big cast and little time between action sequences, but all of their interactions just feel routine and uninspired. There’s this weird love triangle between Tej, Roman, and Ramsey. However, it’s only shown in literally one bit of dialogue in a scene at the end of the movie. It kind of gets established in Furious 7, but it’s never seen anywhere else in either movie. Aside from this, there really aren’t any other storylines that deal with the characters. Everything else that happens serves the main plot.

Now that we’ve established what I don’t like about this movie, we can move on to the good stuff. The fights in this movie are a big selling point. Since the franchise shifted to focus more on action, a lot of the fights have become more and more elaborate and stylized. With this movie in particular, the filmmakers do an excellent job of blending music and one-liners to enhance the choreography. You really feel the intensity. The first notable scene shows Deckard and Hobbs fighting through a gauntlet of prisoners during a prison break. All of the action blends together with the pace of the music to deliver a fantastic sequence. Later on in the movie, we see Shaw rescuing Dom’s son from Cipher’s plane. After he has the baby, he has to fight through all of Cipher’s men while protecting the baby. The whole time, he has the baby wear headphones while listening to the Alvin and the Chipmunks Christmas song. It feels slightly cheesy, but it’s one of the best scenes in the whole movie, if not the best.

This whole franchise has never disappointed when creating big action spectacles. The filmmakers weren’t about to slow down here. Just to summarize, we have Dom racing a flaming car through the streets of Cuba, we have zombie cars flooding the streets of NYC, and we have Cipher “carjacking” a submarine in a frozen Russian lake. There’s a lot going on there, and I’m all for it. As per usual, all of the major stunts were filmed using practical effects. You have real drivers, real car crashes, and real explosions. No, they didn’t film using an actual submarine. However, they did film the vehicles getting blown off the ice by the submarine in the scene. During the zombie car sequence, a lot of the cars were filmed with actual stunt drivers disguised as car seats. Vin Diesel definitely wasn’t driving a flaming car during the opening race, but it sure does look cool. The commitment to practical effects where possible makes the whole franchise stand out from others.

Even though most of the character interactions are portrayed using each character’s established archetype, the movie still is able to use the group as a whole to drive a lot of the action. New director F. Gary Gray wanted the action to revolve around the characters’ relationships, rather than the overall plot. The biggest examples of this are shown through Dom’s working with Cipher against everyone else. During the NYC sequence, the team comes together with car harpoons to stop Dom from getting away with a nuclear football. We see how his actions are tearing them apart as a group. At the same time, we see all of them during the submarine sequence coming together to protect him. When Dom blows up the submarine, the team forms a blockade to protect him from the explosion. In both sequences, the action is used to demonstrate how Dom’s actions have an impact on the group. It’s a nice bit of visual storytelling that isn’t seen a lot in the franchise.

Around the time of this movie’s production and release, the feud between Vin Diesel and Dwayne Johnson was well known. The two had vastly different approaches to filmmaking and butted heads a lot, on this and the previous movies. As a result, you never actually see Dom and Hobbs together in a scene. The two actors seemingly never share a scene together in the entire movie. There a a few times where the characters are together, but you don’t actually see the actors together. Even during the family dinner scene at the end, there are a couple times where it kind of looks like they are together with one of them in the background of a shot. However, the filmmakers could’ve easily been using body doubles for those shots. I didn’t realize this until it was pointed out in a review I watched. It’s one of those things that makes sense once you realize it, but it’s hard to imagine all of the actors not actually being all together at any point in the film.

One time, my buddy showed me this video about the Fast & Furious franchise. It had special effects experts and stunt professionals going over certain moments in the franchise to determine which of them are realistic and which aren’t. To no surprise, all but one of the moments they examined were determined to be unrealistic. The only moment they said was realistic is from the opening race from this movie. Right before the race, Dom uses a soda tab to prep what he calls “poor-man’s turbo”. At some point during the race, he yanks on the tab which breaks a line in the engine. This causes the car to get a turbo boost, similar to the various times we’ve seen characters use Noz. According to these experts, this is a real thing. It may or may not cause the engine to burst into flames like we see in the movie, but the actual boost can be done the way it’s shown in the movie, apparently. I guess if nothing else, there’s at least one realistic moment in this whole franchise.

For as much as this movie delivered on bringing big spectacles and entertaining fights, that’s really all it has going for it. It might use that action to tell a story, but that’s only for a few moments. The rest of the plot just kind of happens. Things need to take place a certain way, so they do. Even Hobbs and Shaw seem to become friendly for no apparent reason. They start off hating each other, but then are throwing insults the way two friends might throw insults at each other. The only thing that changed is that they were forced to work together. Despite all these issues, it’s still an entertaining spectacle. I don’t expect franchises like this to keep doing the same kind of stunts over and over again, so I can appreciate it when they go bigger. All of my issues with this movie don’t make me like it any less. Those issues just serve as a way to compare it to the other films. If you don’t take The Fate of the Furious too seriously, it’s a fun coupe of hours.