Fast & Furious 8 [The Fate of the Furious] ** (2017, Vin Diesel, Jason Statham, Dwayne Johnson, Charlize Theron, Michelle Rodriguez) – Movie Review

The Fast & Furious franchise loses more and more sense of reality as it plunges deeper into over-inflated CGI images and a campy Seventies James Bond-style thriller world-dominating conspiracy plot. Alas, in its relentless search for the widest possible audience, this leaves whole the street racing and driving stunts of the franchise at the starting gate. The film starts as it means to go on, with a CGI-driven car chase round Cuba, ending with Vin Diesel’s red-hot car on fire going backwards and still winning the race he’s bet on.

All quirks and sharp corners are ironed out in the smoothest, fast and furious ride you could imagine, unless you call casting Oscar-winning Dane Helen Mirren as Jason Statham’s cockney mum, that is. (She is very, very bad at this, by the way.) It is incredibly slick but it is soulless film-making. The fun is all mechanical and manufactured now, not organic, not truthful, not even real. Can you have unreal fun? Yes, you can, and this is it.

Acting with blazing, starey eyes, Charlize Theron makes a great villain as cyberterrorist Cipher, the mysterious sexy mastermind who approaches Dom (Vin Diesel) in Cuba and blackmails him into nicking some MacGuffin thing from Agent Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) so she can use it to, er, take over the world.

So Dom is forced to go rogue, and finds no way of telling his new wife Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) and crew what’s up, despite his enormous ingenuity in every other respect, and he seems to have betrayed them, even to the point of going to wipe them all out. The things a man would do for Charlize Theron!

The plot is thin, it doesn’t make much sense or have any logic, and, annoyingly but inevitably, winds up inconclusively, setting up Fast & Furious 9 and going out with a whimper rather than a bang. Characters change sides and/ or are reborn from the dead just as script-writer Chris Morgan fancies at any given moment, which hardly adds to the credibility or authority of the film.

It is all glossy and globe-trotting, adding to the mood and atmosphere of fairy-tale all-action escapism. There are basically three locations, the shores of Cuba, the streets of New York City, and the icy plains off the arctic Barents Sea, all of them eye-catching and well used in the far-fetched/ incredible 007 sort of way.

The main actors go through their well-known acts with some energy. Vin Diesel is, well Vin Diesel. He’s fine. Jason Statham is Jason Statham. He’s fine too, though there’s rather a lot of him this time and he is stuck having to handle the dodgy comedy and the dodgier comedy violence. I could have done without the ‘funny’ sequence where he is carrying around the baby – another MacGuffin, by the way – while shooting dead a whole planeful of villains – pretty dodgy stuff.

Dwayne Johnson seems subdued this time and his role peters out half way, Tyrese Gibson and Ludacris are tiresome and ludicrous as crew men Roman and Tej Parker, Kurt Russell and Scott Eastwood are appallingly wasted and not much good as Mr Nobody and Little Nobody, Nathalie Emmanuel is no good at all as Ramsey, and Kristofer Hivju is just a one-note regulation henchman as Rhodes, but Rodriguez puts some force into it. So, that means it is all up to Diesel, Statham, Theron and Rodriguez, and they do manage it between them, earning their pay checks.

F Gary Gray directs, smoothly, slickly and anonymously, but it’s a serious step down from Straight Outta Compton (2015).

There is no doubt the film misses Paul Walker. I miss Paul Walker. But the film-makers carry on regardless, chucking more and more in the mix in the hope that you won’t notice he’s not there any more.

The film originally had its customary post-credits sequence, but allegedly Vin Diesel forced Universal Pictures to remove it as it was exclusively a Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham clip. However, now Johnson and Statham’s characters are going to get their own movie.

© Derek Winnert 2017 Movie Review

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