By Ben Riela
When you decide to see The Fate Of The Furious movie, you have to go into the movie theatre with the right expectations. If you are expecting an Oscar Best Picture winning film with top-notch dialogue and emotion, then you’re out of luck for this movie. Generally, when you pay your hard earned money to see any Fast And Furious movie, you know what you’re paying to see: nice cars and action scenes with huge explosions. And this movie absolutely delivered on that end, no doubt about it.
The Fate Of The Furious is directed by F. Gary Grey and includes a stacked cast of Vin Diesel (Dom Toretto), Jason Statham (Deckard), Dwayne Johnson (Hobbs), Charlize Theron (Cipher), Michelle Rodriguez (Letty), Tyrese Gibson (Roman), Ludacris (Tej), and Kurt Russell (Mr. Nobody). The movie is centered around when Dom Toretto, the leader of the Fast and Furious crew, is forced to turn against his best friends of Hobbs, Letty, Roman, and Tej by Cipher. Cipher is the leader of the terrorist group in the film and her goal is to acquire and launch nuclear bombs to show her power to the world. Toretto is forced to work with her because she kidnapped his newborn son and is threatening to kill him as leverage. While Toretto is carrying tasks out for Cipher, he’s secretly trying to get away from her and back to his friends while saving his son.
This plot sets up a ton of action scenes, as expected. One such was in New York City when Cipher activates autopilot on all the cars in the city to cause complete mayhem. Cars were driving themselves out of parking garages and falling hundreds of feet to the street! However, nothing beats the pure craziness and action of the last scene of the movie, which takes about 45 minutes. In the seventh Fast And The Furious movie, cars parachuted out of a plane. How can you top that in this movie? By the team of Torreto and his friends stopping a submarine full of nuclear weapons from leaving the Russian Arctic. Even by the absurd standards set by the previous movie, this scene was quite impressive.
Of course it isn’t a Fast And Furious movie without the sweet rides. It was evident that a lot of thought was put into the cars used in the movie. On the sportscar side, there were plenty of Lamborghinis, Ferraris, Mercedes-Benzes and other expensive sports cars to satisfy the racing taste. There were also classic cars, such as the Chevrolet Corvette Stingray. And yes, Tej finally lived his dream of driving a one person tank (called a Ripsaw) in the movie, equipped with a automatic machine gun up top and treads on the bottom. Although the action scenes stole the show in this movie, the amazing rides they do it in make it that much more enjoyable.
Overall, when it comes to these kinds of movies, you have to ask yourself “was I entertained by this movie?” For me, the answer was a resounding yes. The constant action and incredible cars kept me interested the whole way through, with the final action scene in the Arctic being the icing on the cake. When there was a lull in the action, the movie picked up with the comedy, which was surprisingly better than I expected. The movie was even able to incorporate a small tribute of sorts to Paul Walker’s character, Brian, which I thought was the appropriate choice to do. While I wouldn’t say it was the best movie in the entire series, I definitely recommend it to anyone who wants some some great action, good laughs, and sweet rides.
