Furious 7, April 2o15

Clusterfu**

n. A chaotic situation where everything seems to go wrong. It is often caused by incompetence, communication failure, or a complex environment.

v. To fu** (something) up, to make a total mess of. –Wiktionary Creative Commons

 

I’ve been a closet fan of the Fast & Furious Franchise from the get go. Yes, I admit it, I did NOT express my love for this series of movies until F&F 5 and 6, but I WAS dedicated. I loved the simple stories, stereotypical antihero characters AND I have always dug the hell out of the fast cars, the live action crashes and stunts. The F&F franchise brought the car chase back from the edge of extinction by snubbing CGI effects and relying (mostly) on practical car stunts and live action, precision driving. Yeah, life was good for us closet couch-jockey street racers . . . until something awful happened:

 

Car Chases & Stunts

What was (in all the other F&F movies) fast, precision car chases, turned into muddled mush when the previous director, Justin Lin, decided to call it quits and the production team hired James Wan to take over. Wan's got a pretty good résumé as a director of horror films but nothing when it comes to high octane action films . . . and it really shows. His mistake was to think that  if you jump cut all the time, use thousands of camera shot changes (long, medium, close-up and variations of such) through all the action scenes it will make the action seem faster and more urgent. Unfortunately, it has the opposite effect on the audience. Too many changes in point of view confuses the mind, it doesn’t have enough time to figure out what the hell it’s looking at. before it changes to something else So, instead of seeing a car chase that is Fast & Furious we experience action sequences that are Slow & Tedious. Want to see some incredibly exciting car chase choreography? Checkout any of the previous F&F movies, and some of these old favorites: Bullitt (1968), The French Connection (1971),
Vanishing Point (1971), The Seven-Ups (1971), To Live and Die in L.A. (1985)

 

Explosions & GUNS . . . LOTS of BIG GUNS

Okay, we do go to these action films to see cars crashing into each other, buildings exploding, guns going off . . . No, BIG GUNS going off, but in this film it’s far too much BOOM! BOOM! BANG! BANG! So much that after about the third explosion in the last action sequence I was thinking . . . “I wonder, should I have pizza for dinner?” 

 

Hand-to-Hand Combat

And my pet peeve, “Don’t over use camera tricks in a Fight sequence.” They are using this camera technique these days that sort of cuts section out of a fight so you don’t really see the fluid movement of the actors. It was used pretty well in Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014) but they didn’t over use the technique. In Furious 7 all the fight scenes are in a state of constant blurriness. You never really see the fight, and you never really connect with the action: “Hmmm, maybe some pepperoni on that pizza.” Some of my favorite hand-to-hand combat movies are: Enter the Dragon (1971), Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003), Haywire (2011), Merantau (2009), The Matrix (1999)

Did I like anything about this movie? Yeah, I really got into the scenes where the characters are just talking to each other. No guns going off, no fast cars, no explosions, just people talking. Yes, the “romantic” dialogue in a few of the quieter places was a bit clunky, but the actors’ commitment to the whole “We are Family” concept of the film made me believe them, that they really felt the love for each other that the script dictated. And I—YES I DID—I did, have a bit of a tear in my left eye as I watched the heart felt tribute to Paul Walker at the very end of the show.

 

The F&F series has been a pretty successful franchise except for this one misstep. I hope they continue it . . . hopefully, with a director that knows how to film an action scene. But if they decide to stick with Wan on the next one, and he does a really good job . . . I'll send him a pizza.