[Outlier] Furious 7: 2 Much 2 Tolerate
- Joshua Covell
- Dec 11, 2017
- 18 min read
Fast & Furious is a franchise that never intended to be one. You can see it at the top of the marquee, where none of the titles followed the conventions of the previous films¹. It’s obvious with the second film, where one of the stars of the first chose not to return, and with the third, where neither star came back. Considering the lack of foresight, it is a credit to the filmmakers for turning three largely unrelated films, whose only common elements were that cars featured prominently and two of the same adjectives appeared in the titles, into an expanded universe that now spans eight feature films (and two shorts), and counting.
FAMILIA MATTERS
The elevator pitch for the series has changed dramatically over the years. What started out as a small story about an undercover cop trying to infiltrate a gang of drag-racing thieves (“a nearly point-for-point remake of Point Break,” as one reviewer wrote) has now blossomed into a Marvel-style superhero franchise about likeable outlaws who are called upon to save the world when due process fails us and vigilante justice is needed.
But that’s a surface-level summation of the series as it stands, because at its very core, the movies are about how family—in whatever form that might take—is the most important thing in the world, and that these characters will move heaven and earth to protect it. It’s there from the very first movie: Brian O’Connor, played by the late Paul Walker, learns very quickly that Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel²) is more than just a two-dimensional bad guy. Brian is drawn not only to the adrenaline rush that fueled the lifestyle of a group of gear-headed robbers but also to the code that Dom lived by. Even after the crew moved on from racing others cars to battling airplanes and submarines (and generally defying the laws of physics), the central cast of characters and their relationships continue to be the substance underneath all of the ever-increasing flash of the blockbuster spectacle.
In the lead-up to Fast Five’s climactic heist, the crew comes together to make final preparations. The movie takes a beat to step away from the intense action and in its place we’re treated to some wonderful quiet character moments: Roman (Tyrese Gibson) discovers that Mia (Jordana Brewster) is pregnant with Brian’s baby, Han (Sung Kang) and Gisele (the queen, Gal Godot) connect on a more personal level, Dom welcomes Vince (Matt Schulze) back to the group. And then, calling for a toast, Dom delivers what would become the beating heart of the entire series:
“Money will come and go. We all know that. The most important thing in life will always be the people in this room. Right here, right now. Salute, mi familia.”
Salute, mi familia was more than just a catchphrase for Dom; it became a core value of the group and the gravity that brought these films back down to earth even after the action had ballooned to the point of absurdity.
Fast & Furious 6 ends with a similar message, at Dom’s house in Los Angeles, as many of the films would come back to, with the group gathered together for a family cookout. Dom, who spends much of the film trying to rescue and reconnect with his love interest Letty (Michelle Rodriguez), who suffers from amnesia (it’s a long story), asks her if any part of the cookout seems familiar.
“No,” she says, “but it feels like home.”
“That’s good enough for me,” says Dom, and the two take a seat so that Roman can say grace.
A LOSE-LOSE PROPOSITION
The emphasis on family was one reason why it was such a devastating blow when Walker tragically died in a car crash in the middle of filming Furious 7. It was, for all intents and purposes, the loss of a family member. His death sent the cast and crew reeling, and executives had to decide how (or if) to move forward with production.
Of course, the studio was faced with an impossible decision: cancelling the production would mean over $100 million in money already spent and close to a billion in forfeited revenue, but moving forward with the film required some compromises to the narrative.
They ultimately chose to continue with filming and, though they had to find ways to piece the movie together without one of its leads, not much of the story had to change, according to screenwriter Chris Morgan: “In regards to the story, the story actually kind of was the same. The only difference is that whereas we let Brian and Mia and their family kind of go off to just be a family and drop the action-y elements of their lives and stop risking everything when family is so important to them, otherwise we would’ve just kind of continued with Brian learning and adjusting his character a little bit.”
[Author’s aside: Chris Morgan is a very accomplished action movie screenwriter. Not so much a world-class public speaker. But you get the gist.]
The challenge they were faced with became how they could fill the gaps in the film. Because Walker had mostly been shot in action sequences but few dramatic scenes, they found a way to complete Walker’s scenes by using his (real life) brothers as body doubles and superimposing his face onto theirs. While the workaround may have made sense on paper, on screen it was clear that the technology wasn’t quite good enough to compensate for Walker’s absence. The resulting CG was an example of the unsettling nature of the uncanny valley.
Did this end up being the right decision? Aesthetically, obviously not. As the film went on, the reality that much of Walker’s moments on screen were the product of computer software began to set in. It created a visual anachronism that for me was too severe to look past. What was meant to be a catharsis for the audience instead brought out feelings of disappointment (for the compromised production), pity (for the cast and crew who had to make do), and sometimes even disgust (for the digital replacement), pulling the viewer out of the escapist entertainment of the movie world and into the tragic reality where Paul Walker was no longer alive. Furious 7, I think, is an example of when a tribute to an actor and a tearful farewell from the cast stand in sharp contrast to the best possible story they could have told.
STALLED AT THE STARTING LINE
But I would argue that even if Walker had lived through to the end of filming (a morbid thought, I know), the production still would have been troubled, creatively at least, and Furious 7 would have remained an outlier as a particularly bad entry in an otherwise great film franchise.
In order to fully map out the various missteps of the movie, I’ll need to take you through Furious 7 beat by beat. Get comfy.
The film opens with Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham) delivering a monologue about revenge for his comatose brother, Owen (Luke Evans), the villain of the previous movie. The camera follows Shaw from the bedside of his unconscious brother through the hospital where he has laid waste to any staff and security guards who dared stand in his way. It’s a nice device to show the carnage without the chaos and effectively establishes Statham’s Shaw as a one-man army.
What follows, however, shows much less restraint. Dom brings Letty back to Race Wars (a name that was cringe-worthy from the start and has only gotten worse as the years pass), the drag racing competition that they started together, to try to jog her memory. (Because remember: amnesia.) Director James Wan shows off the desert landscape and fills the screen with repeated shots of shiny cars and women’s shapely behinds. You can almost feel the drool pooling underneath the director’s chair behind the camera. It’s not as if hot rods and asses haven’t been a big part of the franchise to that point; it’s more a matter of the gratuitous fetishizing of them, as if it was on this set where Wan first discovered both. The series had, to some extent, moved beyond that kind of juvenile fodder, injecting a bit more sophistication into the presentation, but apparently Wan never got that memo.
Sadly, the race backfires and only serves to re-traumatize Letty. That, or maybe it was the shameless cameo by Iggy Azalea (here confirming that she is somehow a better rapper than she is an actress), one of several reprehensible casting decisions for the film.
Elsewhere, Brian struggles to adjust to domestic life, gunning the engine of his minivan as he drops his son, Jack (played by Hesakid Whocareswhathisnameis), off at school. Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson), meanwhile, fills out paperwork in his office and does a poor job of faking his enthusiasm for it.
Having bested all of their foes, the central characters find themselves uneasy about their places in the world. (Hey, that’s actually an interesting plot direction!) That is, until Shaw upends their boring new lives on his mission of vengeance. He gets the better of Hobbs and his partner, Elena (Elsa Pataky), in a fight that levels the office suite; blows up Dom’s home, nearly killing Dom, Mia, Brian (the first of many terribly CG’d versions of him), and son; and kills Han (Sung Kang), the series’ best character, in Tokyo, connecting this movie to Han’s demise from the third film.
Pause. Let’s recap.
In the first 21 minutes, Wan killed off a fan favorite character (who had already died in Tokyo Drift, but the timeline at this point was so fluid that it didn’t need to happen anytime soon); took Johnson, the most purely charismatic actor in the cast (and maybe the world), out of the action; forced more of the Letty-has-amnesia storyline on us, and assaulted the audience with Iggy Azalea screen time.
Not a good start. And I’m sorry to say that it doesn’t get better from here.
Dom flies to Japan to find more information about Han’s murder and Shaw’s whereabouts. There, he meets up with Sean Boswell, a high school student played by Lucas Black, and Wan splices together footage from Tokyo Drift, released nine years prior, with newly filmed (and narratively superfluous) scenes between Sean and Dom, which, not unlike CG Walker, presents such incongruity between the visuals that it makes the viewer physically ill at the sheer brutality of the passage of time. Like meeting your Tinder hookup, only to realize that they’ve been using profile pictures from a decade ago, it’s a visceral turn-off, and all you’re left to wonder is, Why, God?
Dom returns with his friend’s body and the surviving team members gather for his burial. Dom rests atop the casket a picture of Gisele, who died in the previous film saving Han.
“Promise me, Brian,” Roman says, “no more funerals.”
“Just one more,” Brian replies. And after a pause roughly the length of time it took for a single-celled organism to evolve into the homo erectus, Brian elaborates, “His.”
Now, I’m not going to prop the franchise to this point up as having Sorkin-level dialogue. A lot of the charm in the past has come from cringe-y one-liners delivered by beefy, too-serious men. But this exchange commits the sin of spelling things out and dumbing things down. Granted, it must be difficult for the seventh film of a series to appeal to fans of the previous entries without alienating newcomers, but the scenes Wan directs that serve as the connective tissue between the disjointed storylines from past films, as well as the scenes that move us from plot point to plot point, are unnecessary and poorly executed. Did we need Race Wars (ugh) to understand that Letty is still missing pieces of her memory? Nope. Would the audience have been able to follow Dom’s conversation with Sean in Tokyo without the footage from 2006 to transition us into the scene? You bet. Could the audience have guessed whose funeral Brian was so cryptically referring to? Uh, yeah. No single instance is criminal in and of itself, but as the film speeds along, the evidence starts to mount in the case against Wan being a competent, qualified storyteller.
Dom senses that Shaw is watching them at the funeral, so he hops in his car and gives chase. The two collide head-on and put up their dukes for an old-fashioned brawl when they are interrupted by deus ex machina in two forms³: a covert operative with seemingly limitless resources who smugly calls himself Mr. Nobody (played by Kurt Russell, who milks his lines with the vigor of a lonely farmer), and the God’s Eye, a software program that can be used to hack into any camera on any network in the world. What the f—?
We learn that Mr. Nobody wishes to recruit Dom & Company to track down wanted terrorist Mose Jakande (Djimon Hounsou), who is in possession of Ramsey (Nathalie Emmanuel), the hacker who created God’s Eye. He flies the team in to formulate a plan to rescue Ramsey, and for a brief moment, the movie feels like classic Fast & Furious. The characters volley snappy lines back and forth, each taking turns teasing Roman (the closest thing these films have to comfort food), until they land on a gameplan that is both absurd and reckless.
The feeling doesn’t last long. On the mission, the team drives their cars out of a plane and parachute in, kicking off a chase sequence with an armored convoy (lead by Tony Jaa, who is totally wasted in this role) that ends with Brian jumping from a bus that slides on its side for, give or take, a thousand miles before seesawing off the edge of a cliff. Shaw shows up to add to the collateral damage, but his inclusion in his sequence feels like an afterthought. And eventually he’s joined by yet another villain, Jakande. That makes three in the same scene—excessive and unintelligible. The gang, despite all the baddies, is able to nab Ramsey and escape with only a few cuts and bruises.
Ramsey, she tells them, has shipped God’s Eye off to Abu Dhabi. The only reason I can think of why is because the film needed a sexy foreign locale to film in (with tax incentives!) and Wan demanded an excuse to throw in a slow-motion bikini shot of Emmanuel emerging from the water.
Pictured: Wan's idea of plot.
It turns out, the drive containing God’s Eye was sold by Ramsey’s colleague, and the team now has to steal it from the new owner, an Abu Dhabian prince with a penthouse at the top of a gaudy desert skyscraper where he’s putting on a swanky party. So, dressed in sleek formal wear, they sneak in and get to work locating the drive. Enter terrible casting decision number two: Ronda Rousey, who plays the head of security dressed in a ball gown (form over function, ladies!). She’s only given a few lines, but even with those, Rousey delivers them with the kind of delicate touch she brought to her cage matches. She’s terrible, and not in a cartoonish villain way like Hounsou—more like in an “I’ve never said words aloud before. This is hard!” kind of way. Mercifully, Letty eventually knocks her on her ass.
The drive, in a totally reasonable turn of events, is installed in the ultra-rare supercar in the prince’s penthouse garage. Try as he might, Brian can’t pull the drive from the car. What’s a thieving street racer to do?! Oh, duh, he and Dom can just drive it straight out the window, smashing between the neighboring skyscrapers like the rolling barrels in Donkey Kong. Again, Shaw appears, adding a few more explosions and cluttering the scene. He’s a non-factor, and Brian and Dom are able to pull the drive before the car careens over the side of the final building. As a reward for sitting through that, the audience is gifted with this abomination:
Finally, with God’s Eye at their disposal, Ramsey is able to find Shaw instantly (even though it seems like if they just wait around long enough, he’ll come to them). But when the team goes to apprehend him with the help of Mr. Nobody’s tactical support, they discover that Shaw has been waiting for them and Jakande’s group of mercenaries ambushes the group. Mr. Nobody takes a bullet in the firefight but presumably survives⁴ and Jakande makes off with God’s Eye.
Well, that was a complete waste of time.
The crew, battered but not broken (except for Han and Gisele, who are dead, Hobbs, whose arm is in a cast, and Brian, who is computer generated), has to come together one final time to take down Shaw and Jakande (on their home turf—the streets!). Brian calls Mia to tell her he loves her, possibly sensing that he might not come back alive. It’s well-acted and the most genuinely emotional moment of the movie—but again, it was just a phone call.
Then, a montage! ...that confusingly only features Dom, Brian, and Shaw. After that, we’re quickly thrown into a pretty incomprehensible extended action scene where Jakande, in a helicopter, uses God’s Eye and a drone to target Ramsey, CG Brian, and Tej (Ludacris), who are attempting to hack the hacking device (clever!), and in another part of the city, Dom and Shaw face off with cars and other blunt objects.
All while Dwayne Johnson, the most skilled and interesting action star in the film, sits in his hospital room. He sees the action on the news and out the window. Turning to his daughter, he says, “Daddy’s gotta go to work,” before flexing his broken arm, pulverizing the cast into dust, which is how I picture The Rock leaving for work every morning.
The direction here at the climax of the film is utilitarian and painfully uninteresting, using so many shaky close-ups and quick cuts that it would give Michael Bay a fatal seizure. Every shot is blanketed by oppressive gray and metallic hues from crumbling concrete and twisted steel. It’s bland to look at, which is the meanest thing you can say about an action movie climax. Throughout, the details of who is chasing who, and who is punching who, and who is shooting at who, and who is after what aren’t even worth paying attention to.
Johnson finally arrives (oh, thank god), crashing an ambulance into the drone and commandeering its dope-ass chain gun (a sequence that causes one’s testosterone to spike to opiod-levels). Shaw falls among the rubble of a collapsing building (after Dom delivers the one-liner, “The thing about the streets is…the street always wins.”), and Dom uses his car and a bag of grenades to take out Jakande and his helicopter (in a stunt stolen from Live Free or Die Hard and done worse).
Dom, laying unconscious after the crash, is cradled by Letty. “I remember everything. I remember it all,” she says, which seems a little convenient if you ask me.
He comes to: “It’s about time.”
World saved. Bad guys captured or killed.
The film ends with the gang gathered at the beach this time, since Dom’s house is still a smoldering pile of ash. CG Brian plays at the water’s edge with his wife and son. Dom and the others look on, teary-eyed, the expressions on their faces giving one last sad goodbye to their fallen cast member and friend. It’s emotional, to be sure, but disjointed. Why is Letty sobbing at the sight of Brian playing with Mia and their and son? They will no doubt see each other the next day, and most days after that. Yes, the film pushed the narrative that Brian, because he and Mia were expecting another baby, had to quit the outlaw life that he chose to be a part of in that first film, but in the film’s reality, thinking beyond that moment, Brian, Mia, and Jack will still exist in that world. They’re still familia.
It also comes across as unintentionally disrespectful to Han and Gisele, two characters who, in the reality of the movies, actually died and whom the characters didn’t seem all that upset about losing.
“You aren’t going to say goodbye [to Brian]?” Ramsey asks Dom as he stands to leave, which is a totally normal thing to say to someone about another living person.
“It’s never goodbye,” he says. Hey, that line has two meanings!
Cue the frustratingly catchy Wiz Khalifa track.
Dom drives off in his signature muscle car. He pulls up to a stop sign and sits, that sad look still plastered across his face. CG Brian catches up to him in his tricked-out Supra.
“Hey, you thought you could leave without saying goodbye?” Brian says, which, again, totally not weird.
The two drive side by side. In voiceover, Dom then says, “I used to say I lived my life a quarter mile at a time. And I think that’s why we were brothers. Because you did too.” A montage begins, featuring clips of Brian, and Dom’s aforementioned mi familia speech. The voiceover continues, “No matter where you are, whether it’s a quarter mile away or halfway across the world, you’ll always be with me. And you’ll always be my brother.” The road then splits and Brian and Dom continue on their separate paths.
That’s a metaphor, in case you didn’t catch it.
Phew. I’m really proud of us for making it through. Salute, mi familia.
A LACK OF DIRECTION
So why did Furious 7 feel so uniquely bad? Part of it obviously had to do with the unfortunate death of one of its stars. But as I’ve suggested several times above, a lot of the blame should also be levied against the film’s director, James Wan.
Not pictured: subtlety.
For much of its runtime, Furious 7 epitomizes the worst aspects of the Fast & Furious franchise: the overdone slow-motion butt shots, lazy one-liners, action set pieces that drift further and further away from the films’ bread and butter (cars going fast), and Letty’s memory loss, which was this franchise’s version of Landry accidentally killing someone in season two of Friday Night Lights⁵. Wan clearly didn’t understand what makes Fast & Furious good to begin with, so his version became a parody of the franchise as it went along.
There is probably a good movie somewhere in there, despite the tragedy, but Wan isn’t deft enough to find it. To me, his bag of directorial tricks is too empty, but that’s not surprising considering his pedigree. His specialty is horror, with films like Saw, Insidious, and The Conjuring to his credit (were I to be charitably selective), as well as Dead Silence, Death Sentence, and his role as executive producer on every terrible Saw sequel (were I to be more representative). He trades in schlock, and one presumes that he’s become a very wealthy man because of it, so it’s no wonder that he lacks the subtlety to capture the warm throughline of a series like Fast & Furious.
Compare Wan to the franchise’s long-running director, Justin Lin, who took three disparate films⁶ and created a connected universe by overhauling the timeline and identifying the pieces of these films that makes them so entertaining. Even more importantly, he cemented the emotional foundation that all subsequent Fast & Furious films would be built upon. Wan, on the other hand, largely ignored the themes of Lin’s films (save for a literal foundational mi familia clip from one his movies) and delivered a sophomoric and shallow experience.
Which made it all the more frustrating when Furious 7 somehow garnered the most critical praise of any film in the franchise. I was offended but not surprised. Critics mostly wrote off the previous six films, so I didn’t expect them to understand what made the franchise good either. The fact that it took them so long to appreciate the series—and applaud Furious 7 over Fast Five, the definitive high point to date—was an example of critics finally being unable to continue to ignore the success of a major blockbuster film franchise. This isn’t new. Critics did the same thing with the Mission: Impossible franchise, eventually praising 2011’s Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol after the far superior Mission: Impossible III released in 2006.
F. Gary Gray was asked to direct the eighth film, The Fate of the Furious, which released this year, and thankfully was able to steer things in the right direction. He returned the series to its roots by focusing on family and even cleverly subverted that idea to great effect. As a fan, I was relieved.
Maybe that’s not a big deal. Maybe Wan got what he wanted out of the experience and didn’t want to return. Maybe I’m reading too much into the studio’s decision to not bring him back for another crack at the series.
(I’m not. That’s significant. It’s the ultimate vote of no confidence, and if other studios were smart, they’d think twice before handing the reins of their billion-dollar franchises over to James Wan.)
THE ROAD LESS TRAVELED
I have the luxury of hindsight, but I genuinely think that Furious 7 could have been great. Had the filmmakers stripped the story down to its essential parts, they might have unearthed the best version of this story.
The most obvious changes I’d make would be to reduce the number of villains and narrative strands. Cut Hounsou’s Jakande. Cut Tony Jaa’s character. Cut Ronda Rousey’s character and slap yourself as hard as you can for considering her in the first place. Cut God’s Eye, Ramsey, and Mr. Nobody—they’re unnecessary and add too many plotlines. And for the love of god, cut Iggy Azalea.
So what’s left?
There is a scene early on in the film (one of those dramatic scenes filmed after Walker had died) between Dom and Mia, before Shaw tries to blow them up, where Mia shares how tough the transition to domestic life has been for Brian: “The white picket fence is like an anchor on him, I can tell. I tried to talk to him the other night. You know what he said? He doesn’t miss the girls. He doesn’t miss the cars. He misses the bullets.” She looks at Dom like a woman who’s run out of answers.
“Let him settle in. Give him time,” Dom says.
That’s the heart of the movie. That’s the conflict.
Here’s how you make that work: Brian is struggling to leave the action behind and settle down⁷. The team, meanwhile, is globetrotting and perpetrating heists without him. He suffers some serious FOMO but knows that he has responsibilities at home. It’s a painful adjustment, but the crew takes every opportunity to make jokes at his expense—classic Fast & Furious.
Things don’t stay quiet for long, though, because someone (Statham’s Shaw) is picking off members of the crew one by one. He kills Han in Tokyo. He tries to kill Hobbs, but Elena is caught in the melee and dies. And despite quitting that life, Brian is killed.
The survivors mourn their lost friends and gear up to take out Shaw before he comes for them. That’s it. Dwayne Johnson isn’t confined to a hospital bed. Less need for CG Brian. And, more importantly, the cast is able to channel their real sadness for Walker’s death into their on-screen sadness for the deaths of Brian and the others. Simple, clear, and with sky-high stakes.
Unfortunately, Wan doesn’t have the right skill set to tell this story, especially the crucial opening. But Lin, with his understanding of the series and the characters, could have made a truly memorable film.
That’s how I wish it had gone, anyway.
You know, it’s funny—the more closely I looked at Furious 7 for this piece, the less I irrationally hated it. What I was able to clarify, though, were the reasons why I initially did. A lot went wrong in the production of that film, some of it out of the filmmakers’ control but much of it not.
After all this, I’m left with one final takeaway: it is disappointing enough to have a lone failure in a series of films that I hold so dearly, but the biggest let down is that Paul Walker’s last movie didn’t honor him in the way that it should have.
¹ The Fast and the Furious (2001), 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003), The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006), Fast & Furious (2009), Fast Five (2011), Fast & Furious 6 (2013), Furious 7 (2015), and The Fate of the Furious (2017), which really should have been titled F8 of the Furious.
² Whether you’re in the camp that wants the franchise keys to be handed over to Dwayne Johnson or not, The Fate of the Furious proved that Vin Diesel is (has been and should always be) the lifeblood of the franchise.
³ Plural form: dei ex machina
⁴ He does!
⁵ This storyline, along with “Nikki and Paolo” from Lost, is one of the inspirations for the Outlier series.
⁶ Lin also directed Tokyo Drift, but, as mentioned in the opening, that film was made with a new cast because Diesel, whom the film was written for, decided not to continue on with the franchise after the first movie. He was brought on to do an end credits scene in Tokyo Drift and returned for good with the next film.
⁷ Think Nathan Drake in the opening hours of Uncharted 4.
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