#just strap them to each other throw a parachute on them and chuck them out of a plane

[yesterdayiwrote]

I’m not going to lie, it’s giving MASSIVE rebound energy from both of them…

[iamcarriesoom]

Furiouser and Furiouser

After ramping up my interest in and dedication to these movies for the past few installments, my hopes were sky-high for this one. Ridiculous-stunt-wise, it was pretty much on point, but as a whole I was a bit disappointed. Not disappointing, however, are the keywords displayed for this movie on IMDb: car falling off a cliff, star died before release, terrorist, revenge, hospital.

We open on Jason Statham, and my first thought is that I’m gonna need to watch this movie with closed captions on so I can understand wtf he’s saying. He’s chatting with his brother, Gaston, who is somehow still alive (though very burned and in a coma) after being launched out of a burning plane (though technically so was Dom and he basically walked away unscathed. He vows revenge and then blows up a lot of the hospital, which seems like a weird choice considering his brother is there.

Dom takes Letty to Race Wars (OMG how have they not changed the name?) to try to trigger her memories. Based on the crowd there, it is apparent that these movies are 80% about cars and 20% about butts. Speaking of butts, Iggy Azalea has a cameo (more like Ugh-y Azalea, am I right?)

Brian is revving an engine, which, surprise! Is in the minivan he drives now because he’s a boring suburban dad now.

Letty runs off and Dom finds her at her own gravestone. Oof. He tries to smash it with sledgehammer and she’s like “No, it’s accurate, Letty died,” and then she takes off which is way harsh, Tai. I mean I get it, but I still feel bad for Dom.

Hobbs is working late at his whatever-it-is-that-he-does job. I know he must not have a strict dress code at [mystery government agency] but a skintight Under Armor tank top seems like it might be pushing the boundaries? He chases Elena, who works for him I guess, to her car to give her a job recommendation for some other job she wants to take. They have kind of a romantic vibe and if I’m being honest, I ship it. When he goes back in, Jason Statham is stealing info off his computer.

He’s like “I’m here for the team that crippled my brother,” and I have a lot of questions. How did he know to go to Hobbs for that info? How does he know it was a team? When he says “my brother,” how does Hobbs automatically know who he’s talking about?

Anyway, they start beating each other up and I’m immediately not liking the way the camera is moving during all of these stunts. If a guy somersaults and the camera spins with him, it’s like he didn’t move at all. I don’t watch action movies to see a ROOM flip over, I want to see a GUY flip over! I don’t know if it’s easier or harder to shoot stunts like this, but it definitely makes them look less impressive, or makes it harder to see how impressive they are.

Elena comes back to help her boss but Jason Statham throws a grenade and they basically jump out the window to save themselves. People in these movies love jumping off buildings onto the roofs of cars, like car roofs are mattresses or something.

Brian, Mia and Dom are hanging out at home. There’s a package on the porch for Dom, and Brian’s getting their son (Jack) strapped into the car. Apparently he’s restless as a dad because he “misses the bullets” from their adventurous lives, which is pretty fucked up. Mia’s pregnant again and tells her brother but not her baby daddy.

Dom’s phone rings and it’s Jason Statham calling from Tokyo right after smashing Han’s car and leaving it to explode. Dom looks at the package on his porch right when it explodes hard enough to take out half the house. It’s…bonkers. Brian slams the minivan door so Jack doesn’t get exploded, but the blast smashes his head into the window. This is the first of many times in this movie that I wonder “Is this how Brian dies?” I spend most of the movie waiting for him to die.

Dom and Hobbs (who has a surprise daughter!!!!) have a chat in the hospital room where Hobbs is laid up with a couple broken bones, basically the first character to ever have any physical repercussions for all their shenanigans. Hobbs is like “Definitely don’t go after this guy…wink wink wink.” It’s extremely weird that this team of car racing petty thieves is now the go-to group of on-call government assasins.

Dom heads to Tokyo and bumps into Mark Paul Gosselaar Jr racing in the garage. At first I was like “Man, Bow Wow has really aged well, he looks basically the same as he did in Tokyo Drift!” Then I realized it was just literally the scene from the end of Tokyo Drift. That also made it weird for the next, new scene, where Mark Paul Gosselaar Jr ages like 10 years in a few minutes. That must’ve been one hell of a race.

Dom is somehow in charge of bringing Han’s body back to the states to be buried in LA, which I find a little odd- does he not have any [other] family? Dom gives a speech and then leaves the funeral to chase the shady car driving by, which naturally has Jason Statham in it. Jason Statham speeds through a yellow light and Dom is stuck, and I’m pretty sure this is the first time in the entire franchise I’ve seen a character stop at a red light.

They play a weird game of chicken and fucking wreck each others’ cars instead of just shooting each other like gentlemen. Then some weird no-name guy who looks like the dad from Step By Step busts in with a whole bunch of stealth goons and Jason Statham gets away. The guy’s name is Mr Nobody and he’s played by Kurt Russell but doesn’t really look like Kurt Russell. Other people up for this role, according to IMDb: Denzel Washington, Halle Barry, Taylor Lautner. What did that casting call even say?? “Character description: a human, probably”?

Mr Nobody loves Belgian beers and wants Dom to find a hacker named Ramsey who’s built some sort of software called God’s Eye, which is basically a suped-up version of that thing from The Dark Knight where they use cell phone cameras to spy on the world. I don’t think any facial recognition software that fast/accurate exists, but sure ok whatever. A warlord has kidnapped Ramsey and Mr Nobody wants Dom to double-kidnap (rescue?) her and in exchange, he can use God’s Eye to find Jason Statham and murder him to avenge Han.

Honestly, Mr Nobody is such a weird character that I assumed he was a secret bad guy for most of the movie even though he said he was friends with Hobbs. Much like I also thought Han was a secret bad guy for most of Tokyo Drift. They keep throwing these mysterious benefactors at us with no explanation and I can’t help but assume they have ulterior motives!

Mr Nobody basically fucks a keg of Belgian ale and then invites (forces? this isn’t clear) Dom’s whole team to come help. Including Letty, even though she took off. Tyrese takes solo credit for everything they’ve ever done and tries to be in charge, but then Tej comes up with the ultimate plan, which ends up being to parachute in their cars out of plane in Azerbaijan. My notes just say “WHAT THE FUCK.”

The plan surprisingly ends up mostly working- they have to bust through a lot of armored jeeps with machine guns, and a heavily armed bus, and somehow Jason Statham is also there driving a sports car through the woods. Brian’s in charge of getting Ramsey (who I briefly also thought might be a secret bad guy) off the bus. Surprise: Ramsey’s an attractive young woman! Whoa! Women know how to use computers? That’s nuts. Brian basically chucks her onto the hood of Dom’s car and is like “you deal with this” and goes back to fighting a highly trained martial artist and matching him punch for punch. When did he become an MMA fighter?

Brian accidentally shoots the bus driver and the other guy traps him on the bus as it’s about to go off a cliff. Without a fully fleshed out plan, Brian climbs out the front door of the bus, precariously hanging over a cliff, climbs up it, and then runs up the bus as it’s falling off the cliff and launches himself at Letty’s car as she drives over to rescue him. It’s such an insane plan, I can’t believe that’s not how he dies.

Dom basically drives off a cliff with Ramsey in the car and they roll down a mountain and somehow find everyone else. Tyrese immediately starts creeping on Ramsey like “she doesn’t LOOK like a hacker!” Tej is like “What to hackers LOOK like?” THANK YOU TEJ. I hope Ramsey picks no one, but if she picks someone I hope it’s you. Brian is apparently also an EMT now because he starts asking Ramsey questions to make sure she’s not a concussion.

They head to Abu Dhabi to pick up “the device” for God’s Eye, which I thought was a program, because Ramsey sent it to her friend for safekeeping. When they get there they apparently have time to take a swim, where Tyrese gets that gem of a line “It’s hotter than I thought it would be.” Twist: he is not talking about the desert, but about Ramsey’s smoking bod! It’s funny when women are referred to as “it”!

Ramsey’s shit-ass friend is like “Great news! I sold it!” Who are you, the mom who sold her kid’s $5000 Magic card because he left it in her house? JFC dude. He agrees to get them into the party of the super rich guy who bought it, and believe it or not this guy put the device in his fancy sports car. 

The gang gets to dress fancy and Dom and Letty have a Moment in the elevator where she starts to have flashes of memory. They have to sneak into a few different places and get the device out of the car without getting caught by this guy’s fancy all-lady security team, including UFC fighter/terrible actress Ronda Rousey. Brian and Dom get to the car and the plan is for Dom to just lift the car with his arms while Brian slides underneath to get the device. Somehow this takes about nine years.

The gang starts to get found out so they just hop in the car and crash through the party, right when Jason Statham shows up and starts shooting. It seems like a waste that they agreed to risk their lives to find Ramsey in exchange for using God’s Eye to find Jason Statham if he’s just gonna show up everywhere they go anyway.

They end up driving the car out of the penthouse apartment and into a building next door, where they smash a bunch of terra cotta warriors. I really hate when antiquities get smashed in movies. I did not care for that scene in The Core when they blew up the Coliseum. Leave antiquities alone!! They drive through some more buildings and Brian rips the device out of the car from inside it, and they manage to bail right before the car plummets to its death.

They do not explain how everyone else managed to get out of that fancy apartment without getting shot by Jason Statham or put in Abu Dhabi prison, but they do at least kind of try to explain how God’s Eye words. They find Jason Statham, and Dom and Mr Nobody start coming up with a plan to take him out. Dom’s like “My guys are racers, not killers.” Dom, since when has that mattered to ANYONE. They’re also not detectives, computer experts, safe crackers or martial artists, but that hasn’t stopped them from being masters at all of those things!

Brian and Dom, plus Mr Nobody and his team, take off for another quip-fest at Jason Statham’s warehouse. Jason Statham brings in the warlord who originally kidnapped Ramsey, and his whole team, and I’m fairly certain this is the scene where Brian is going to die.

Mr Nobody gets shot, and Mr Nobody’s number one dies. Dom and Brian drag him out of there, they lose God’s Eye, and as it turns out Mr Nobody isn’t even dying. They abandon him by the side of the road (he had a helicopter coming but it still felt kinda cold) and head back to the gang to figure out what’s next.

Dom is gonna find Jason Statham (bad guy #1), and the rest of the gang is gonna roam the city so Ramsey can counter-hack God’s Eye to shut bad guy #2 (Djimon Hounsou) out. I feel like law enforcement definitely should’ve been trying to do something about Djimon Hounsou’s chopper with the torpedo drone. As should be expected, they’re making a big fucking mess and Hobbs sees it on tv. I kind of forgot that he wasn’t in most of this movie.

Hobbs is like “Daddy’s gotta go work” and flexes so hard his cast breaks off. This is not an exaggeration like when I said Mr Nobody fucked a keg of Belgian Ale. This is an actual thing that happened in the movie.

Dom meets Jason Statham on a rooftop and they start wailing on each other with wrenches. We already know Dom beat a man halfway to death with a wrench, so I like his odds here.

Brian has to break into a cell tower to do something so Ramsey can keep hacking. I feel like there’s WAY too much going on in this movie. He has to fight the same henchman he fought on the bus, which I always like. I like when each protagonist has their own henchman adversary through the movie and it’s like “Oh, you again.” Once again I’m sure this scene is how Brian dies.

Hobbs jumps an ambulance off a bridge to take down Djimon Hounsou’s torpedo drone, then he rips the machine gun off of it and carries it around with him to try to shoot down the helicopter. Somehow Brian gets the cell tower to do whatever he was trying to do, and Ramsey’s 80% complete hack just finished up without having to start over. I don’t think any of this is how computers work?

Dom and Jason Statham are still wrenching each other and yet neither has any major damage. Dom’s like “The thing about street fights, the street always wins, “which is probably the dumbest line in the whole movie. He basically pushes Jason Statham into a crevasse in the crumbling parking garage and jumps his car at the helicopter to deliver them a bag of grenades, which Hobbs shoots with his machine gun and takes the whole thing down.

Dom absolutely should not have survived that, but the team rushes around and Brian gives him some extremely terrible CPR, and Letty gushes about how she remembers everything. Surprise! They’re married. No one even knew! She wore a surprisingly feminine wedding dress. He comes back to life and they’re in love again.

Somehow Jason Statham survived and is in jail now, but is surprisingly cocky about his escape plans.

Everyone else goes on a beach vacation (or maybe just to the beach, they do all live in LA.) Ramsey’s just…in the family now. Did she not have a life or friends to go back to from her pre-kidnap days? They’re all creepily watching Brian and Mia play with Jack on the beach.

This is where the movie gets fucking weird. I don’t know if this is an unpopular opinion, but the end of this movie is Bad. They’re all extremely emotional about Brian being “home” and how “it’s never goodbye.” I understand that they’re symbolically saying all that about Paul Walker, the actor, who died, but the character, Brian, is alive. We’re still in the movie world! You can’t start the in memoriam for the ACTOR while the movie is still happening!

Dom takes off in his car, but then Brian pulls up to him at a light and they race for a little while and then go their separate ways, and also a bunch of old clips of Brian from the previous movies play with a light Wiz Khalifa soundtrack. It made me questions whether I’d missed something or if they were implying Brian was a ghost. Maybe this would’ve all made more sense if I’d seen it closer to when he actually passed away, and not the day after I was tweeting how creepy it was that he met his girlfriend when he was 33 and she was 16? I’ll never know. I do know that I definitely thought that Brian would die when Paul Walker died, and I enjoy that they let him live, elsewhere, on a beach with Mia and their kids. Have a nice life, Brian.

Previously:

Vol 6: Planes, Tanks & Automobiles

Vol 5: 5ast 5ive

Vol 4: Fast & Fourious

Vol 3: What’s even the point of driftng?

Vol 2: 2 Furious 2 Quit

Vol 1: The Fast & the Curious