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Well, I just got back from Furious 7 and took the time to dry my eyes before writing this up. What a film. I'm putting the plot synopsis, which is a little spoiler-y, ahead of my own review of the film. Read at your own risk, even if it's an abridged plot.

SPOILER

First of all, know that this is a long movie. It's a hair over two hours long, which means they had room for exposition, and boy do they use it. The beginning of the movie, the first twenty minutes or so, is used entirely to establish that Deckard Shaw is a badass motherfucker, to the point of being essentially invincible and untraceable. He is on the warpath after visiting a crippled and comatose Owen Shaw in the hospital, out to locate and kill everybody on Dom's team from the previous movie. Deckard's first target is Han, who is killed in Tokyo via recycled FnF3 footage. They also recycle the post-credits scene from FnF6 (which used the same FnF3 footage) so Deckard can properly threaten Dom by blowing up his house. Dom travels to Tokyo to meet with Sean Boswell and collect Han's body for burial. Viewers finally get some closure on the race at the end of FnF3. At the funeral back in the States, Deckard and Dom face off, but they're interrupted by government agent "Mr. Nobody" (previously named Frank Petty in press documents), who gives Dom access to a program that can track down Deckard... if Dom will do him the favor of rescuing the hacker responsible for creating the program. He even manages to bring in Letty to help out (she couldn't leave Dom). The first big action setpiece of the film takes place "somewhere in the Caucasus" as Dom & Co. chase down a military convoy to save Ramsey, the hacker, from a despot named Jakande. Jakande was planning to torture Ramsey for access to God's Eye, the tracking program, in order to expand his power. Along the way, Deckard appears to add to the chaos. The crew barely escapes after losing the majority of their vehicles. Ramsey reveals that the program is in the hands of a friend in Abu Dhabi. Guess where the movie heads to next? Fresh off the plane in the UAE, the gang is told that the program is hidden inside a supercar owned by a billionaire who just happens to have the car holed up in his penthouse at the top of one of the city's many skyscrapers. They infiltrate the party with the intent of merely removing the program from the car, but Deckard shows up and shoots the place up. A myriad of fight scenes ensue as everybody finds a way to escape the building. Dom and Brian steal the car after nabbing the program, and escape Deckard's explosive offense by jumping the car between three skyscrapers. They hand the program off to Mr. Nobody, who gives them carte blanche to handle Deckard as they see fit. God's Eye locates him inside a factory, so they make haste with military reinforcements in tow. Deckard foresaw the play, and reveals that he's employed Jakande and his army to help him out. One massive gunfight later, Deckard escapes and Jakande manages to secure his price: God's Eye. Dom and Brian save a wounded Mr. Nobody, who says that he will be in touch with them later, but that for now they need to take down Deckard. With Jakande in command of God's Eye, the crew cannot hide, nor ambush Deckard. They head to the place they know best, "back home" in LA, to recover. They make a plan to hack God's Eye while protecting Ramsey, as Ramsey is the only threat to Jakande's complete control of God's Eye. Jakande patrols the skies of LA in an attack helicopter while directing Deckard on the ground to Dom's location. Dom takes his father's Charger out of the garage one last time (for the third time ) to face off with Deckard. Brian, Letty and Roman use three cars and swap Ramsey between them to escape Jakande's murderous assault while Ramsey slowly hacks God's Eye. Dom and Deckard face off on the roof of a parking garage. As the fight rages on in drawn out Dragonball Z style, God's Eye is hacked and taken out of Jakande's control. Jakande decides to take out Dom and Deckard before escaping, but only manages to damage the roof of the garage. Dom manages to use the newly damaged terrain to defeat Deckard, who is taken into custody. Dom, now harassed by the helicopter, takes the Charger off of a makeshift ramp to attempt a crash, but misses and plummets to the ground. Jakande is knocked out of the sky by "surprise motherfuckers" Hobbs wielding a minigun. Dom wakes from unconsciousness after being pulled from the wreckage of the Charger by Letty, who reveals not only that she regained her memories, but that she remembered that she and Dom married at some point between this and the previous film. Letty asks why he didn't mention it in his attempts to regain her memory. He replies "you can't just tell somebody that they love you". Cue awwwwwws from audience. Finally, the gang is enjoying some time on the beach. Brian is playing with Mia and their child. Everybody acknowledges that it's a proper time to let Brian enjoy the life he's made for himself. Dom gets up and leaves, saying that "it's never goodbye", without saying a word to Brian. Dom drives down the highway and comes to a stop sign. A white Supra pulls up next to him, with Brian in the driver's seat. Brian chides Dom for leaving without saying goodbye. Dom only smiles, and they both take off grinning. A clip show begins, showing footage of Brian in previous FnF movies. The two cars come to a fork in the road, and part ways. The camera follows the Supra over a hill into the distance, and the sun washes out the picture as "For Paul" appears on screen and fades to credits.

Thoughts on the film, positive and negative.

+ A lot of speculation was put on this film for how it was going to handle Paul's death. I'll vouch for the production team for the CGI used to keep him in the film. I saw a few examples of "this scene is actually CGI Paul" after the film, and could not believe it. It certainly fooled me, and I was actively looking for uncanny valley throughout. The team mined his voice for usable cuts to put into scenes where he's off-screen. There are times where you notice a slight difference in the sound quality of his voice (they used old recordings and sound editing over his brothers' voices to create unfinished dialog), but it's not jarring.

+ Every character gets meaningful screen time. Tej gets a fight scene!

+ Sean Boswell returns and gets a proper scene with Dom.

+ Music choices aren't annoying this time around. Nothing crazy or out of place.

+ The sheer amount of callbacks to previous films will make any fan giddy. Fried pistons? Tuna sandwiches? Ludicrous advertising for Corona? All here, and more.


- The CGI work done to revive Paul is great, but having only half of his scenes filmed before his death is plainly visible in the editing of the film. It is painfully obvious that major restructuring had to be done to accommodate the loss of a key actor. Paul is absent from a lot of scenes where he'd normally be. He doesn't have a voice in group settings, like when they're making plans, when it was usually him bouncing ideas off of Dom. Instead, we hear him agreeing or disagreeing to things with single line responses off-screen more often than not. Some parts of the movie have places where you know he would say something in the situation, but they resort to just having him smile or grin as a reaction without words. Hordes of scenes where he's a focal point manage to get by with quick shots of his face intercut with long shots of whoever he's talking to. It's impossible not to notice that Paul isn't really in the film very often.

- Holy fuuuuuuuuuck is this film long. It's over two hours long, so prepare to sit for a while.

- Deckard is unrealistically pitted against Hobbs and Dom and seems completely impervious to damage. He survives a lot of the film with barely a scratch on him, even after getting his face pounded in by Hobbs. Even after getting hit in the face with a socket wrench.

- Mr. Nobody is obviously a foreshadowing character used to set up sequels, but his exit from the film is poorly handled. They literally just leave him on the side of the road.

- The head bodyguard in Abu Dhabi is a terrible actress.


Altogether, a B+/A- movie. It's not perfect. It's not as goofy as previous films. It runs a bit long. However, all of the ingredients are here for a fun romp and a touching sendoff to the series' original star. It's not the best FnF movie, but it's a damn good one.

For Paul.

I might just instead of going to the theaters I'll just get the broke ass cunt way.

I thoroughly enjoyed it! So many feels too at the end. Overall it's definitely one of the best films in the franchise.

I think Fast Five was the pinnacle of the series.

5 > 7 > 6 > 1 > 4 > 2 > 3

Really interested in seeing what they can do now that they're in current times and can mesh with Tokyo Drift characters..It only took nine years for the newly crowned DK to finally finish that race.

A question I posed yesterday was: the result of the race with Dom. Who won? If Sean won, does that make him better than Brian since he actually beat Dom? If Dom won, does that mean Dom is the new Drift King?

Tyrese earned his fucking paycheck this time, cha-ching

Really enjoyed this movie. I agree that 5 is the best in the series, but this one is definitely right on it's heels.

SPOILER

The head bodyguard in Abu Dhabi was Ronda Rousey. She's an MMA fighter and hasn't been in many movies. So her poor acting is pretty understandable. Really liked Tony Jaa in this movie though. I'm glad he appeared in more than just one fight scene.

He did! In one of the interviews they said they tried to give him a big spot light so they can show Paul W brother less on the screen.

SPOILER

Again, I wish they would show more racing in the movie but it was expected so i was not disappointed. Great movie! I would pay to go see it in the theaters again. Time to wait for Fast 8.. Yes it is coming out, check out the interview with Vin Diesel, he bought the rights to the movies. It's going to be a whole other thing where you don't see the same gang anymore.

This post has been edited by RedsunsF1 on Apr 5 2015, 08:08 PM

Furious/movie logic

SPOILER

collapsing building does not in fact kill a person. Also minigun firing upon a chopper = no damage to it whatsoever unless you dead on hit one of the blades, but still it'll keep flying until a charger does transporter shit to leave a bag of grenades for a handgun to get a dead on hit to finally destroy it.

Highlighting logical flaws in an FnF movie is like explaining what's so great about Mia's tuna sandwich.

Are we talking about an actual sandwich or some other sandwich?

Because that answer for either will be different.

also

SPOILER

LISTEN TO MY VOICE, ITS BETTER THAN CPR!

Only two people in that scene would have any sort of formal medical training, and none of them performed correctly.

In my head I'm imagining in Vin Diesel's voice as he revived "...I was just waitin' to hear those words from you so I could use this Fenix Down on myself." <Pulls out a feather and the ghost of Fenix from FF4 revives him to perfect health>

I think he was just taking a well deserved nap after fighting TWO bad guys.

That shit's hard work, yo.

Great movie,saw it twice this weekend . Cried a bit each time .

Yeah, I lost it as soon as the white Supra rolled up. I knew exactly what was happening, and I couldn't handle it.

It was a good movie

SPOILER

I realized they do the same crap in almost every fast and furious 5,6,7 "Lets steal something lets infiltrate it from a bad guy lets repeat" Anyone started to realize this?.

^

SPOILER

That didn't happen in a literal sense this time around, unless you count the bag that ended up on the helicopter. God's Eye was stolen from a GOOD guy.

I'll agree that the movie was good! Definitely a strong addition to the franchise, they took themselves seriously as well as added campy parts when needed. Despite all the things that happened while the film was in production, the overall movie quality was not hindered.

SPOILER

My favorite part was when Dwayne the Rock Johnson literally flexed and broke out of his arm cast. That was hilarious.

(THIS POST WAS REMOVED BY REQUEST)

So, I saw this yesterday afternoon, and... Well... I won't say I'm much of fan of the series. I've seen each movie once each, if even.

And I can still say I enjoyed it, even as it's own thing.

SPOILER

And yeah. That montage at the end hit me, even if I hadn't really experienced the whole series. In a way, I still understood the whole family bond between Brian and Dom.

That, and I guess the fact that Paul Walker had passed sort of dropped on me all at once at that moment.

This post has been edited by Miura Seri on Apr 9 2015, 06:04 PM

The song that plays during the final scene is absolute perfection.



^ That is the one instance in the entire film where I could tell that it wasn't really Paul. His face is "off" in many ways and the eyes are too damn shiny. Otherwise, well done.

It hit me like a ton of bricks when Paul initially passed. I really don't get emotional when it comes to people I don't know, but he was different. He was one of those guys who was really genuine on screen. His passion and love for cars was as real as it gets, and through interviews, you could always tell that he was one of those car guys that you could walk right up to at a meet and just BS with for an hour... And for me, it's not just that he was such an amazing person that we as a community lost, it's even more so that I'll never have a chance to meet him and truly see for myself how amazing he was.

I think that may be the reason why we can take something as goofy and technically inaccurate as the FnF franchise, and love it as fondly as we do. Vin and Paul always seemed like genuine people, not overblown "Hollywood types" just cashing in to make a stupid movie for big bucks.

The dude loved cars, and went as far as paying for the paperwork for the four Skylines used in 2F2F so he could drive them in the film. He went a step further by buying another one as a personal vehicle, because they had so much fun playing with the stunt cars (the four that he legalized) in between takes.

His taste in cars was completely different before the Fast movies so its refreshing that the movies informed his personal life as much as he informed it. He was a guy who remembered who I was.. but only because he saw my face, tried to remember my name, remembered my car down to the designation of the paint code (not an exaggeration); and only THEN remembered my name. So typical car guy. lol. A lot of his friends who would have little business knowing each other ended up becoming quite close after he was gone. As tragic as his loss is, it did bring a lot of people together in ways no one really imagined and I think he'd at least be happy knowing that.

I never once took a picture with him when I was with him because I didn't want him to feel like he was anything other than another car guy to me. I only took my wife's picture with him because she got all star struck when I introduced them. I'm glad I did though since it turned out to be one of the last.

...But back to the movies. I'm hoping they are going to try dialing the series back to more of the underground type stuff that we saw in the first movies. The impossible stunts and explosions were fun and admittedly since it was Paul's farewell movie, there was the pressure to make it that much more spectacular and impossible. Now though I don't think there's any point in trying to top all the explosions and insane stunts. If you keep giving that to people, I think it will numb the audience to the enjoyment of watching the films since they're pretty much invincible now. There's no sense of tension that there's a threat if they keep mounting bigger and bigger things that they blow through.

I keep joking that they're getting so ridiculous they're going to tie it into Triple X and Riddick from all the crazy since the whole working with a secret organization and the impossible car maneuvers reeks of the Triple X stuff. For Riddick, I was joking that Letty and Dom spawned a race of people so FAST and so FURIOUS, that they were always angry so they were called FURIANS and Riddick is Dom's genetic reincarnation.

Also did anyone else think "STAAAAAAARS" every time Nemes.. erm Deckard Shaw appeared in the most inconvenient places following the team and he was busy being an unstoppable killing machine you couldn't hurt?

This post has been edited by JKaiba on Apr 10 2015, 12:12 PM