Good bye Rock, hello Dwayne Johnson. The man has
finally arrived. No longer can it be said that the days of true movie stardom
are behind us because Johnson has somehow tapped into the reservoirs of old and
burst on the scene as the next big thing. While you might be asking, but he
already is a movie star and he already was the highest paid actor in Hollywood
for 2016, you would be right. My answer to you is less, he did all those
things, but not until Fate of the Furious has he shown his true potential of elevating
every scene he is in to good, borderline great movie making. And that is an
increasingly more difficult task to do with the ridiculous excess of the Fast
and the Furious franchise. The single sequence that is cringeworthy that has
been discussed ad nauseam is the interaction between Johnson and Jason Statham
discussing their pasts, threatening each other and then laughing and accepting
one another. This is the dilemma that the Fast series keeps running into of
terrible dialogue and over the top action sequences. If you remove Johnson from
the film it is an absolute dumpster fire of trash but with him he elevates it
to the third best in the series. The sheer ridiculousness of the film is
getting more and more difficult to accept and based on the US box office take,
it appears that people may finally be wising up to it. Since Furious 4 they
simply have been trying to one up the last movie and they finally may have one
upped to far for even the most diehard fans. Don't get me wrong, the film will make
over a billion dollars and there will be a ninth, but maybe now the critics and
fans are wising up to what they are actually watching. Cars and explosions. By
the standard of movie definition, the critics should hate this franchise just
like they hate everything that Michael Bay comes up, with which they should.
Somehow Vin Diesel has been bullet proof when it comes to his precious car
universe. Hopefully we are finally seeing some chinks in the armor.
Fate of the Furious has the Gang fighting against
themselves when Cipher (Charlize Theron) randomly shows up at the beginning of
the film and shows Dom (Vin Diesel) some information that will motivate him to
completely betray his entire 'family' that they have spent the last 6 films
(Tokyo Drift excluded) building towards you never turn your back on family. The
main question I have at this point is what the heck kind of skills does this
team of car racers have that no one else in the world have? They keep getting
pulled into these amazing, world ending scenarios and all they can do is drive
cars really fast. When did Tej Parker (Ludicrous) become this ultimate hacker
able to defeat the world’s most dangerous hacker? The only member of the team
that actually has their talents introduced and explained is Ramesy (Nathalie
Emmanuel) and that’s only because she created the 'God's Eye' program and was
introduced in the last film. Everyone else just picks up these amazing talents
whenever the plot needs them to. And the plot needs them to pull things out of
thin air a lot. Since when could thousands of cars be hacked and then driven
and inserted with autopilots, creating a drone car army? Or be able to do
anything with a nuclear football without all the codes from the different
people that MOVIES THEMSELVES have taught us they need? Or anyone be able to
hack into a NUCLEAR SUBMARINE and drive it remotely? Or completely remove the
nuclear fallout from detonated nuclear missiles by simply removing an
electronic chip? That uranium doesn't just go away. And all of this is made
actually entertaining by the charm and charisma or Dwayne Johnson. Whenever he
is not on screen or in the background, the film is laughable and boring. The
main lesson here is that Johnson was right to beef with Diesel over screen time
because he absolutely save this film from being a clunker. 2 ½ pipes out of
4.
