The Fate of the Furious - Movie Review

THIS MOVIE IS RIDICULOUS! But, if you are already a fan of the Fast and Furious franchise then you already know this. The absurdity level seems to get kicked up a notch with every new film in the series, as it should, but this one reaches new levels. I'm not saying this is a bad thing. No, I've come to really enjoy how absurd and ridiculous some of these action movies can be. For example, in the last installment Furious 7, Paul Walker and Vin Diesel steal a car from a prince in Abu Dhabi. To escape the bad guys, Vin Diesel drives the car out the window where it flies through the air, crashes into another building, lands and races through that building, flies out of the 2nd building, and finally crashes through a 3rd building where the car plummets to a final fiery crash. Of course both leading actors survive this.

So how do you top that? Well screenwriter Chris Morgan certainly has some crazy ideas knocking around his head! One of those crazy ideas involves hacking into cars that have an "auto driver" function. Then using these "zombie cars" (not my term) as a weapon for the bad guys in order for them to retrieve a suitcase containing launch codes for a cache of nuclear missiles from the Russian Minister of Defense, who just happens to be in New York City at the time. The entire premise is ridiculous, but is also an amazing amount of fun.  I found myself both laughing out loud and gasping in astonishment at what I was seeing.

The most absurd aspect of this movie, also with the last three, is that now these former street racers are all part of an elite strike force who specialize in fast cars. For the life of me I can think of a situation that

1. presents a problem involving an army of driverless cars
2. has a solution that involves MORE CARS!

The payoff for this scene is extraordinary. It's exactly what I love about these absurd action films. I go in not knowing what I'm about to see and walk out having seen something that I never in my life would imagine having wanted to see until I saw it.

Now, I do believe the producers of this film skipped over a unique opportunity. Why is this movie called The FATE of the Furious, when it clearly should have been titled The F8 of the Furious? It's the eighth movie of the franchise, but it does not sour the series at all. In fact, just like Fast Five did, F8 gave the franchise new life.

Without Paul Walker, the team was missing a major player, but his real life death was handled very well in Furious 7 as well as Fate of the Furious. Paul Walker, or Brian (his character's name), is mentioned a few times in the new movie and we learn that he's still alive but not involved in the team's hijinks anymore.

F8 spins the formula of the series a bit too. This time the Furious squad faces the one person they can't beat, Vin Diesel himself! Dominic Turretto (Vin Diesel) finds himself in between a rock and a hard place and must decide between his racing family and his real family. That's ok though, where one good guy flips to bad, a bad guy flips to good. Jason Statham returns as Deckard, the main antagonist of Furious 7, but this time the good guys reveal the motivation behind Deckhard's behavior. It turns out, he's not such a bad guy after all, just misunderstood.

All in all, this was a very fun blockbuster movie. If you're a fan of absurd action sequences, can get over the mediocre acting (not from The Rock, of course, I'll never say anything bad about The People's Champion), and ridiculous premise (it's a prerequisite for seeing these films that you throw any ideas of normalcy, or more simply, just the laws of physics in general out the window) then you are in for a treat.

Final Grade: B