'Furious' No. 8 - fast, spectacular and a tad too long
At some point during the chasing, racing “The Fate of the Furious,” you might be inclined to stop rooting for the good guys and start feeling sorry for the bad ones.
After all, the poor villains square off against such manly men as Luke Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson), a walking steroid experiment so massive and tough that rubber bullets seem to tickle him.
And deadly assassin Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham), Hobbs' archrival who's shaped like a .45 caliber bullet and moves like one, too.
And Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel), an animated tree trunk who rolls out of about-to-crash vehicles with such aplomb, he barely needs a Band-Aid.
Pity the poor villains pitted against them: a super cyberterrorist named Cipher, played by Charlize Theron as if her Snow White evil queen overdosed on medical marijuana; and her ruthless henchman Rhodes (Kristofer Hivju), armed with a deadly cache of red hair.
“The Fate of the Furious” marks No. 8 in the “Furious” franchise that began as a modest street-racing thriller in 2001. It's the first chapter created since the death of series regular Paul Walker in 2013.
This explosive seventh sequel, directed by F. Gary Gray (among his credits, “Straight Outta Compton” and the 2003 “Italian Job” remake), repositions the main franchise characters as globe-trotting wannabe 007s pressed to save the world from the megalomaniac Cipher, who wants to “teach a lesson” to the planet by firing off a few nuclear missiles from a computer-operated Russian submarine she controls.
But enough about the simplistic, almost irrelevant plot.
“Fate of the Furious” is about family. We know this because commercials and trailers tell us. The characters constantly remind us.
And the movie really is about family, but in ways that can't be discussed here so as to avoid massive spoilers.
It suffices to reveal that Dom's Cuban honeymoon with Letty (Michelle Rodriquez) takes a bad turn when a glazed and dazed Cipher shows Dom something on her cellphone, instantly transforming him into her mercenary slave.
Dom nearly kills Hobbs and Shaw, threatens to shoot Letty and does whatever Cipher instructs him to do.
“This isn't Dom!” Letty laments. “What has she got on him?”
About an hour and 20 minutes into the action, Gray hits us with the movie's visual effects showstopper. Cipher taps into the computers operating Manhattan cars, turning them into an armada of “zombie” vehicles on a suicide mission to stop Hobbs' teammates, culminating in a spectacular shower of automobiles flying from the tops of skyscrapers like a waterfall of steel and glass and tires.
Gray's effects team almost matches this segment at the end with a preposterously silly showdown at a wintry Russian military base where Dom and his crew outrun a nuclear submarine that springs up through the ice like a bloated killer whale.
At 136 minutes, “The Fate of the Furious” suffers from a “more is more” approach that effectively dilutes the power of the movie had it been trimmed down to fighting weight by minimizing its slow-motion shots.
The addition of Kurt Russell's sagely U.S. agent Mr. Nobody is a delight, being the only character in the movie who knowingly treats the material as sheer spoof. Nobody's rule-following new assistant (Scott Eastwood) eventually gets around to being likable.
Tyrese Gibson and Ludacris supply the comic relief team of Roman and Tej, the bickering good guys.
But the biggest heist is carried out by a baby so adorable and happy amid all the violence and noise that he steals the movie during a comical escape sequence no doubt inspired by John Woo's classic “Hard-Boiled.”
“The Fate of the Furious”
★ ★ ½
Starring: Vin Diesel, Dwayne Johnson, Charlize Theron, Jason Statham, Michelle Rodriguez, Kurt Russell
Directed by: F. Gary Gray
Other: A Universal Pictures release. Rated PG-13 for violence. 136 minutes