In the good old days, movies such as “Furious 7” didn’t exist, because studios made major movies for adults and relegated teen fare to marginal sensationalism. The liberated Hollywood of recent years is liberated in two directions: toward the conspicuously personal and idiosyncratic (as in the films of Wes Anderson, Sofia Coppola, and Terrence Malick) and toward the nakedly mercantile (as in the “Fast and Furious” series). The industry approaches its commercial base with an unabashed forthrightness and leaves the sophisticated audience to independent producers and the audacious directors whose work they finance.
But a film’s place in a production schedule is no limit on its results. Just as some movies by the most distinctive directors also prove to be profitable, some movies made as part of a baldly commercial slate also have artistic merit—and James Wan’s “Furious 7” is among the latter. It exhibits simple joy in its intricate cleverness, and sincere wonder in physical action, the primal heat of family bonds, and hearty humor under pressure. As such, it’s a brazen caricature of passions and virtues, but its superficial exertions tap deep into a core of raw feeling and give it a benignly vigorous shape.
Two stories overlap: the war of a British bad guy, Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham), against the entire Furious crew, and the war of a terrorist, Mose Jakande (Djimon Hounsou), against America and the world. Yet it’s also the tale of two marriages: Brian (Paul Walker) is married to Mia (Jordana Brewster) and struggling with his new role as domesticated father to their young son, Jack. Meanwhile, Mia’s brother, Dom (Vin Diesel), is married to Letty (Michelle Rodriguez), who suffers from amnesia and can’t remember their romantic past. (There’s a paramilitary “50 First Dates” embedded in the action.)
After Deckard steals data from a shadowy security bureau and tries to blow up Brian and his family, the Furious clan—including the tech genius Tej (Ludacris) and the showman Roman (Tyrese Gibson)—return to action for one more mission. Jakande has kidnapped a hacker named Ramsey (Nathalie Emmanuel), whose “God’s Eye” device is the Rosetta Stone of global surveillance. Jakande wants it for his own ends but will first let Deckard use it against the Furious. The U.S. government wants the device, too, but can’t afford to have its official fingerprints on the mission to rescue Ramsey and get hold of it—in fighting non-state evildoers, non-state agents are needed. So the Furious are subcontracted for the job, and, in exchange, will be allowed to deploy the device against Deckard.
The government is embodied by a character of a deliciously arachnid benevolence: Mr. Nobody (Kurt Russell), a tightly wound supernerd with the bearing of an old-fashioned military-industrial executive, whose web of connections reaches far, deep, and high and who lends the Furious his most sophisticated toymakers to equip them for their decisive battle with Terror & Co. The politics of that small-scale war are established in advance, because the targets in question aren’t abstract—the war has already come home to the Furious, with the nearly catastrophic demolition of Brian’s home. The notion of fighting “over there” to protect families “over here” is rendered literal from the start.
The fighting is the source of the fun—the blend of high-speed NASCAR-style needle-threading, demolition-derby impact, martial-arts choreography, and cross-vehicular crawls and leaps, all of which are rendered deliriously hyperbolic in visions of a nearly hallucinatory splendor. Wan renders the weightiest items weightless, as in the midair ballet of cars and trucks dropped from a military transport plane above the Caucasus Mountains; the burst of a high-speed sports car out one tower window and into another, then out the other side and into a third, in the pristine heights of Abu Dhabi; and the leap of an armored vehicle from over a bridge in Los Angeles, where the action begins and concludes. The Rube-Goldberg-esque interlocking of speed, flight, marksmanship, combat, and acrobatics in elaborate plein-air set pieces are notable feats of visual engineering.
There’s even a comic aspect to the grand-scale spectacle of wreckage that the fighting unleashes—though one would have to be a Donald-Rumsfeld-level solipsist not to recognize that, if the drama were real, it would come at the cost of many civilian lives. It’s noteworthy that the Furious wreak the bulk of their collateral damage in Abu Dhabi; Jakande unleashes it mainly in Los Angeles, in scenes—one of which involves a toppling skyscraper—that are unfailingly reminiscent of the attacks on September 11th. (Action movies are always looking back at history and at the genre; the heroics of the Furious agent Hobbs, played by Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson, are a jovial riff on “Rambo.”
In other words, “Furious 7” is a story of ambient imminent apocalypse and the handful of government-backed freelance saviors who, working not for money but for love, can stave it off. And love really is the core of the story. Wan’s action photography draws its power not only from technique but from the throb of crude and pure emotion that underpins it like a bass line. It may seem strange to contemplate the script of such a terse movie, but “Furious 7,” as written by Chris Morgan, turns the word “family” into a metaphor that liberates it from the pieties of home; it offers the pulp immediacy of a world without parents, a lateral world of affinities built of unquestioned tests and forged with unfailing responsibility. And the actors bring it out—or, rather, seem to be living it: they share an easy, understated familiarity, a relaxed and good-humored pleasure in performance that could be borrowed from a Hope and Crosby “Road” movie. (The performances here suggest the wide range of movies—including intimate, naturalistic dramas—that these actors should be cast in, and that the late Paul Walker, whose last film this is, should have been tapped for.)
“Furious 7” plays like the old-school arena-rock of movies—Bon Jovi, say, or Aerosmith—packaging adolescent wildness in sleek and sharp machinery. At its best, it’s like a song that’s meant for driving; at its worst, it's like one that belongs in a car commercial. Its cinematic style is less aesthetic than industrial, like that of this year’s models. The means of conveyance—the narrative machinery—isn’t drastically different from that of a cinematic Model T, but the technical standards and devices are those of the moment, and its contours signify that moment—and will rapidly come to seem dated.
Its forthright pleasures have sharp limits, in other words. Yet its virtues are brought out by contrast with certain etiolated art-house productions that mistake ambiguity for complexity, gentility for virtue, solemnity for honesty, and plainness for authenticity. One of the odd results of the current world of movies is that, despite their multiplex ubiquity, such big-budget productions as “Furious 7,” or any of the superhero movies that fans of the “midrange drama” decry, have come to seem as niche-oriented—and even, in a way, as marginal—as lower-budget movies of conspicuous artistic ambition. The multiplex fare may make more money, but—as this year’s Oscar nominations show—the overtly ambitious films are the center of discussion.
Classic-era Hollywood may have propelled serious dramas into mainstream prominence—and this list of the top box-office hits of 1954 offers several astonishments—but there was also an element of “Furious 7,” of joyful vulgarity and rowdy showmanship, in most of the best movies of that time. It’s worth considering the confrontation with violence (inner and outer), the fiercely forged affinities, and the sheer pursuit of thrills and striving for ecstasy, that also mark the best, and more obviously marginal art films of our own time. (See, for instance, the ski-chase scene and the Society of the Crossed Keys in “The Grand Budapest Hotel.”) “Furious 7” may not, itself, be great art, but it’s part of the family.
