Movie Review - The Fate of the Furious (2017)

[Dave Gray]

The Fate of the Furious (2017)

Premise: A megalomaniacal hacker uses a secret to turn a heist-leader against his team.

Rating: Some positive changes in tone and a bold new direction are a promising start, but ditching practical crashes for weightless CG action and 2nd-half bloat sinks the effort.

This movie starts off pretty well.  The opening stuff, while more CG (fake fire that's obvious), feels like a return to the racing roots of the series.  It also uses the CG close-ups to show engine parts, which is a nice call-back to seeing the NOS tubes light up.  Of course, it's over the top and dumb, but some of the camera work following over-the-top of the cars was a nice addition.  And the plot, while totally soap-operaesque in its idiocy, started the premise of the movie off in a good direction.  I was surprised at how well it was going.

There is a great fight scene in a prison and there is definitely a tone-shift to a more humor-based action.  It works most of the time and it takes the pressure off of the action being bad-ass and leans into the silliness a little.  The most underserved character in the movies so far has been Roman -- he's not really had value, but with this new more humorous tone, he fits right in and shines a lot more.

Then it goes off the rails.

The action is bad.  It's really fake-looking.  The premises are dumb and it's like a zombie apocalypse crowd-shot, but with cars.  And that's over and over again.  Pretty much every car action sequence looks shitty and like a video cut-scene, which is a shame because right around Fast Five, the action looked incredible, despite the silliness of it all.

The plot is extra stupid down the stretch and is so heavily focused on one of my pet-peeves, which is hackers real-time out-hacking each other...the concept is super-duper dumb.  WAAAAY dumb.  And the movie is an hour too long...like, a legit hour.  The final sequence is hard to look at, looks terrible, the fake cars are faking around on fake ice.  And it's so, so, so long.  It just goes on and on and on.

The 2nd half really brings it down.  Too bad.  I hope as the series progresses, they will ditch the escalation of stunts if it means the stunts aren't practical for most of it.  It's a disservice.  I would like the tone to stay, though.  I think that the lighter-tone humor worked.  The director isn't as good -- full stop.  Some of the choices just play too corny and the reveals to jokes are made too early by the director tipping his hand with types of shots or music.  It's a step backwards in vision.

[Brian Fein]

I think its interesting that you pulled "comedy" as the nuance in this film.  I don't think, save for a few throw-away lines by Roman "getting his young selfie levels up," are intended to be funny.  Like there's parts of the prison riot that are funny, like when Hobbs is fighting guards and you see like 6 guys go flying against a wall before he walks out...  But I don't think its intended to be funny.

I liked the tone of this movie, in that Dom gone evil brings a new twist.  But there are maybe 3 or 4 twists in this movie that the viewer wasn't supposed to predict.  You must be a brilliant movie scientist because I didn't see them coming on first view.

And all your commentary about CGI, doesn't bother me.  I'm sure they didn't actually drive a Lambo on the ice in Siberia.  I don't care that they faked the ice, every movie uses CG.  I'm fine with it.  I didn't think it looked overly bad.

In all this was my favorite movie of the franchise, but its not a surprise that you and I have differing tastes in movies.  That's well documented over the past 25 years.

[Dave Gray]

I'm just thinking back to the beginning, The Rock talking to the soccer kids, Roman has an increased role, the stuff with Shaw and the baby is played for laughs where he's talking goo-goo to the baby while he takes out a team.

I feel like the action is funny, too.  The way that The Rock fights in the prison is more funny than bad-ass.  He's like throwing people on other people.  It's not serious (never was), but it's light-hearted or something.

The Rock and Hobbs are constantly bantering, so are Taj and Roman.  Most of the stuff with Nobody/Little Nobody is really played for laughs, I think.  Vin Diesel/Letty are super serious the whole time, but that's pretty much it.

[Brian Fein]

if you like that witty banter mixed with action, maybe Hobbs and Shaw is for you.  There is a lot of that tit-for-tat humor and competitiveness between their characters throughout the movie while they try to take down a bad guy together and also hate each other.  But its a spinoff of the Fast franchise and I'd say not required for continuity.