In the opening few minutes of Furious 7 Brian O’Conner(Paul Walker)’s son throws a toy car out a minivan door and says that it flew. O’Conner responds that cars can’t fly, but Furious 7 goes about doing its best to prove O’Conner wrong. Much like O’Conner’s son and the toy car, Furious 7 is just a boy playing with his toys. In this case the boy is director James Wan, but the effect is the same: cars doing impossible things in a seemingly random series of events.
I generally like to give some sort of movie plot synopsis or plot teaser, but in this case there really isn’t one. The Furious crew does random stuff while Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham) tries to kill/stop them. Also Djimon Hounsou plays a bad guy too. Not sure what his goal was other than to be not good.
Any time any of this movie’s actors were tasked with acting or setting up the movie’s ‘plot’ Furious 7 ground to a halt. It was stilted and cliché. I mean it was almost unbearable. However, once the cars started literally flying the movie started figuratively flying. It was so much fun to watch these characters do impossible things all with wide grins on their faces. For Furious 8 I hope they skip the ‘talking’ scenes all together and just come up with crazy set pieces because that is what the Fast & Furious franchise is now. Mind-bending-ly awesome car stunts.
I am not sure if Furious 7 is a good movie or not, but once the chit chat stopped I enjoyed myself quite a bit, and that has to count for something. I don’t know what sort wild things James Wan has planned for Furious 8, but it will be hard to top what he put on screen with Furious 7. If you want to believe that cars can fly, Furious 7 might just be what you are looking for.