A 'Fate Of The Furious' Review From Someone Who's Completely Avoided The Franchise [SPOILERS]

THE FATE OF THE FURIOUS

Confession: I’ve never actually watched a Fast & Furious movie. I’ve sat through countless trailers, seen whole sequences over the shoulder of someone sitting near me on an airplane, read thinkpieces, and laughed at satirical takedowns, but actually bothering to spend 2+ hours sitting in the cinema to watch the latest instalment of a franchise I’d been avoiding since day one? Come on, you couldn’t pay me to do that.

Of course, when The Music’s editorial El Jefe pointed out that I was, in fact, being paid to do this, a devilish bargain was struck: I’d go watch my first-ever Fast film in the form of The Fate Of The Furious, and type about it from the position of fresh fish; a grand critical saga of innocence, and innocence lost.

The Fate Of The Furious opens in Cuba, land of salsa and vintage cars, where both women with buttocks spilling out of tiny hotpants and adorable gaggles of children seemingly love nought more than standing on the side of the road to watch life-endangering illegal street drags. Monte Hellman’s 1971 classic Two-Lane Blacktop portrayed drag-racing as a cold realm of existentialist nihilism, but here, it’s, apparently, wholesome family entertainment. The film is barely two minutes in before Vin Diesel is challenging some evil local to a street-race staged over a “Cuban mile”, which is, I’m guessing, 1.6 kilometres, given that Cuba — like every country in the world that isn’t America — uses the metric system.

Diesel soups up the engine of some old shitbox via the pull-tab from a product-placed carbonated beverage, fangs it so fast the engine catches on fire, then wins the race by driving in reverse; bailing out of his careening fireball at the finish line, as the auto hurtles into the ocean, thereby not harming the inexplicable gathered crowd who inexplicably cheer when Diesel gives his cousin the keys to his car. This, I’m guessing, is not the first time in a F&F joint that logic is doused in gasoline, set ablaze, and buried at sea; and marks merely the first moment in this particular film that someone will drive a car so fast that it catches on fire.

"When someone says ‘la familia’ before the opening credits are out, it marks the first of 16 times in The Fate Of The Furious where family is evoked."

Despite the fact that the Evil Cuban tried, numerous times, to kill him during their drag-race — and, at one point, shouted “that’s impossible!”, in the earliest example of characters-saying-face-palmingly-rudimentary-things-aloud — Diesel shows he’s the bigger man by refusing to take the car he’s won. “Keep your car,” he says, as if a beatific monk delivering a blessing, “your respect is good enough for me.” Instead of making an enemy, he wants to make an ally; any member of the street-racing community part of his all-encompassing notion of family. When someone says ‘la familia’ before the opening credits are out, it marks the first of 16 times in The Fate Of The Furious where family is evoked.

Speaking of family: after Diesel has leapt out of the automotive fireball, narrowly avoiding death and multiple counts of vehicular manslaughter, he’s lying in a post-coital bed with Michelle Rodriguez. They’re talking about making babies, and M-Rod says something like “I keep imagining you as a dad”, which turns out to be the most entry-level foreshadowing imaginable. As it turns out, Diesel — like Logan, Jack Reacher, and countless soap-opera characters before him — is, unbeknownst to him, already a dad; screenwriter Chris Morgan uncorking the creaky canard of the surprise child. The adorable bairn in question has been kidnapped by Charlize Theron’s peroxide-dreadlocked cyber-terrorist, who gads about the world in a top-secret jetplane, which can elude satellite surveillance and apparently never stop for refuelling. Diesel’s son is so damn adorable that he’s used as moral justification for everything that happens: Diesel going “rogue” in don’t-sweat-it-it-won’t-last heel turn; the gang-getting-back-together; Jason Statham flipping from former-instalment villain (right?) to unlikely ally; Statham and Dwayne Johnson male-bonding by threatening acts of ultraviolence upon each other; and, most notably, HUNDREDS UPON HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE DYING.

Assumedly, at some point, the Fast & Furious franchise was about drag-racing, and car-chases, and maybe even motorhead culture. But The Fate Of The Furious is as much about gun worship as car worship; the same eroticising close-ups of cars used when Theron unveils her endless cache of guns; the film soon devolving into shoot-’em-ups in which the horrifying bouts of automatic weaponfire happen on wheels.

Theron has a seemingly-endless raft of anonymous henchmen — presided over by Game Of Thrones beardo Kristofer Hivju — that serve as pure cannon-fodder; their facelessness allowing them to non-dramatically die in one of the film’s myriad explosions, or to get gleefully shot by one of our chosen gang of heroes.

At one point, when the action has transferred to an icy Siberian wilderness apparently perfect to drive sportscars on, Tyrese Gibson —the grindingly-unfunny “comic” relief — point blank shoots five people, and it’s played for laughs. There’s another zany scene in which Statham has to brutally murder a host of henchman whilst tending to a baby basket, saying “this is going to be a lot of fun” before engaging in sociopathic slaughter. Such bloodless violence is par for the Hollywood course, but there’s something particularly galling, given recent real-world events, with witnessing the numerous scenes herein in which cars drive down sidewalks, sending crowds scattering.

Here, car chases aren’t just on expansive ice, but in warehouses, military bases and NYC streets. In one sequence that particularly makes no sense, a giant wrecking ball cleans up a pursuing host of German cop-cars, only it’s never shown what it’s suspended from (a cloud perhaps), and how that happens to sit perfectly over the road. Assumedly every little lost soul in these crushed kraut cars is left for dead, but, hey, it’s their fault for not being on the right side of the Family.

Our contractually-obligated mafia all drive separate cars even when on the same covert mission, doing the automotive industry’s job of marketing vehicles as visual representations of your personality. The characters here are all caricatures at best, or empty vessels at worst. Ludacris is in it, but says or does nothing of much interest (unless you’re into people reciting litanies of horsepower, cylinders and engine capacity). Nathalie Emmanuel plays an implausibly-attractive hacker who displays no quantifiable character traits at all. And, speaking of hackers, there’s sure an interminable amount of scenes in which characters flail super-fast at keyboards, whilst video screens cavort with info-graphics and global maps; Hollywood’s depiction of hacking, as always, embarrassing.

Theron isn’t just a hacker, but an ultra-villain who wants to steal WMDs and take over the world, which she will do when the ticking-clock countdown to a nuclear launch hits zero (which surely it will, no one can stop her, right?). When the action’s peaking, Theron walks around in an earpiece, looking for all the world like a telesales agent, commanding her underlings to hack this or hack that; whether it’s a CGI swarm of auto-drive cars, or a Russian nuclear sub. Her vision of taking over the world — and, indeed, the Family’s attempts to stop her — involve as many explosions as possible.

And this is what The Fate Of The Furious is about. For all the paternal handwringing over children, the endless evocations of family (even Helen Mirren shows up, as Statham’s cockney ‘muvva’), and the fact that the film ends with the whole gang linking hands and saying grace(!!!), this is a film about cars driving fast, cars exploding, and then crashing into other things that explode.

When yr old bean Film Carew actually sat down, for the first-ever time, to watch a Fast & Furious movie, this is literally a note that I took: “another car on fire, more explosions; so many explosions”. So, so many.