The beauty of the “Fast and the Furious” movies is their simplicity. The high concept of the new film can be summed up in a handful of words—a dead man’s brother seeks revenge on the Toretto gang—but fans don’t flock to the films for the story, they come to see the wild celebration of muscle cars, muscle shirts and muscle heads, and in this, “Furious 7” does not disappoint.
The new film begins with Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel), Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker) and company (Michelle Rodriguez, Tyrese Gibson, Chris “Ludacris” Bridges and Jordana Brewster) finally attempting to lead normal lives back in the United States. The timely wounding of mercenary and bad guy Owen Shaw (Luke Evans)—he was gravely injured in the last film when the Mercedes G463 he was in flew out of the cargo dock of a moving plane—was the last obstacle between the “F&F” crew and peace and tranquility. Trouble is, Owen’s older brother, Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham) wants revenge. Adding intrigue to the mix is a mysterious maybe-he’s-a-good-guy-maybe-he’s-not government operative named Mr. Nobody (Kurt Russell), beautiful hacker Ramsey (Nathalie Emmanuel)—“That is a woman worth falling out of a plane for,” says Roman.—and a ruthless warlord (Djimon Hounsou) who yells “Get him!” every few minutes.
That’s it. After that it’s all snappy one-liners, wild car chases, fight scenes, etc.
You might want to have your cholesterol checked after “Furious 7.” This much cheese in one serving can’t be good for you. You may also get sunburnt from the reflected glare of all the explosions. The new “F&F” movie might not be good for you, but it is two hours and twenty minutes of no-airbag fun.
It’s also a further step toward the James Bonding of the series. But not the Daniel Craig 007. “Furious 7” has more in common with the realm of the ridiculous gadget heavy Bond movies that featured exotic locations, automobile acrobatics—there’s every kind of car crash here, including a wild car chase inside a luxury apartment!—and villainous characters. Not content with just one bad guy “Furious 7” offers up two, Statham as the revenge starved brother-on-a-mission and, as back-up, the trigger happy Hounsou
It also gives the silliest of Bond stories—I’m looking at you “Moonraker”—a run for its money. The plot isn’t as much a story as it is justification to put the characters in motion. Why risk life-and-limb to get access to a computer program that will help Toretto’s clan located Shaw when he seems to pop up around every corner? It’s the thing that fuels most of the action, and it makes absolutely no sense at all. At best it is an excuse to introduce Ramsey, the picture’s Bond girl.
Not that any of that matters. Audiences don’t go to the “F&F” movies to engage their brains; they go for the crazy stunts and the cocky swagger. They go for the “vehicular warfare,” the “No way!” moments and Diesel’s rumble and mumble line delivery. Here Vin goes head to head with Statham for the title of Gravelliest Voiced Action Star, and winds up in a tie.
Subtle it ain’t but that is the beauty of these movies. They know what they are and they deliver time in and time out. From Diesel’s “unleash the beast” scenes to mano- a-car action, “Furious 7” exists in its own ecosystem where Dwayne “Daddy’s got to go to work” Johnson’s can remove a cast from his broken arm by simply flexing his oversized biceps and cars can effortlessly glide from one high rise to another.
As important as the action are the camaraderie and loyalty. “I don’t have friends,” says Dom, “ I have family,” a point nicely made in a touching coda paying tribute to star Paul Walker who died in a car accident in November 2013.
“Furious 7” is a bit long—a movie like this should be a down-and-dirty eighty-eight minutes—but it’s also a loud-and-proud crowd pleaser that never misses a chance to rev its engine.
Furious 7 has already generated its share of column inches from entertainment journalists. The cast has spent the last few weeks doing the junket rounds, talking to everyone with a microphone or a notepad, generating sound bites and stories that have fed newspapers, websites and television shows.
Star Michelle Rodriguez, who plays Letty Ortiz, spoke of getting “pretty crazy” after co-star Paul Walker’s death. “I was pushing myself to feel,” she said by way of explanation of some of her tabloid level behaviour in the last year.
Ludacris, who has played technical expert Tej Parker in four F&F films, told the Today show, “We’re about to make history as the most successful franchise of all time.”
Vin Diesel has talked about naming his daughter after his friend and co-star Walker—“ “There’s no other person that I was thinking about as I was cutting this umbilical cord.”—and made grand pronouncements about the quality of his film.
“Universal is going to have the biggest movie in history with this movie,” Diesel said, likely sounding as though he’s dragging every word through sandpaper. “It will probably win best picture at the Oscars, unless the Oscars don’t want to be relevant ever.”
He’s likely only half wrong. In 2011 he made a similar award season prediction about Fast 5 and while that didn’t pan out, the movie made a fortune, grossing north of six hundred million dollars worldwide.
He’s right to say that the new film will surely put the pedal to the metal and sell a lot of popcorn. Despite so-so reviews the Fast and Furious franchise has an EZ Pass to the box office fast lane, grossing two billion plus dollars since racing into theatres in 2001. “Just because they are for the working class doesn’t mean they’re not great,” Diesel said.
F&F fans enjoy the formula, which can be broken down to essentially this: Swagger interrupted by a snappy one liner, a wild car chase, a fight scene, repeat.
The movies aren’t Kierkegaard, and that’s one of the reasons they haven’t run out of gas yet. Over seven entries they’ve remained loud and proud, lowbrow and unashamed. They’re a wild celebration of muscle cars, muscle shirts and muscle heads. Like an engorged Hot Wheels set, the films are playthings for the directors—there have been 4 over the run of the series—who tow the company line time after time offering up a car crushing stew where sophisticated line readings and nuanced storytelling take a backseat to frenetic editing and in-your-face explosive action. They exist in a world where people only drink Budweiser and bastardizations like Bud Lime don’t exist. That purity of vision is the beauty of the series.
Sure, they change things up from time to time by adding new characters but casting The Rock or Jason Statham isn’t much of a stretch. Both have migrated from the kind of turbo charged action movies that could be considered companion pieces to the F&F films and both have the kind of poly-appeal that makes men want to be them and women want to see them.
Despite the loss of Paul Walker, you can bet Furious 7 won’t be the last movie in the series. As long as the formula works and the money continues to come in fast and furious Diesel and company won’t put these films in the rear view mirror.
Actor Dwayne Johnson, better known as ‘The Rock’, talks to “Canada AM” film critic Richard Crouse about his role as ‘Hercules’, and passion to create something different.
“When I was a kid I remember being visually captivated by the Steve Reeves poster,” says Johnson. “He’s breaking free of this pillar and chains. I didn’t know the mythology back then but I knew the image. That image captivated me. When I was a kid I was always drawn to men who were able to accomplish things, whether they were big things or little things, but men who took care of business physically.”
Dwayne Johnson’s first exposure to legendary strongman Hercules didn’t come from mythology class, but from a legendary bodybuilder-turned-actor who played the divine Greek hero on screen twice.
“When I was a kid I remember being visually captivated by the Steve Reeves poster,” says Johnson.
“He’s breaking free of this pillar and chains. I didn’t know the mythology back then but I knew the image. That image captivated me.
“When I was a kid I was always drawn to men who were able to accomplish things, whether they were big things or little things, but men who took care of business physically.”
Years later as Johnson, then better known as wrestling superstar The Rock, was transitioning from the ring to the screen he thought his bulked up physique would make him the new Steve Reeves.
“When I got to Hollywood I spoke to executives and I brought up Hercules. Didn’t have the clout to make anything happen back then. I have a little bit more these days though and I was able to make it happen.”
The result of Johnson’s lifelong dream is Hercules, an action adventure based on the graphic novel Hercules: The Thracian Wars and co-starring John Hurt, Ian McShane and model-turned-actress Irina Shayk.
“There’s been so many iterations of Hercules over the years I wanted to create something different,” he says.
“Hopefully epic and hopefully redefine him for our generation.”
In the film, Hercules rejects his own mythology in an attempt to stay grounded, something Johnson understands.
“I have enjoyed a good amount of success and I’m very grateful for everything that I have,” the bulky actor says.
“Like Hercules not buying into the myth, not buying into the story but just being aware of it, I’m very grateful for being who I am and making sure that I continue to approach every project and everything that I do as if it is going to be my last.
“There was a time when I was in Canada, playing for the CFL and sleeping on a mattress that I got from the garbage of a sex motel. I’ll never forget it. True story. So, for me, those times are kind of in the forefront of my mind.
“The wolf is always scratching at the door. It’s good to remember that. It’s important.”
“We were happy to do whatever was asked of us whenever it was asked of us,” says Transformers: Age of Extinction star Jack Reynor.
The Colorado-born, Irish-raised actor proved he was game for anything when he was given just twenty minutes to prepare for a wild scene that brought him face-to-face with real explosions.
“It is an incredibly intimidating experience in many ways,” he said, “but at the end of the day you have to trust the people around you, that they know what they’re doing that they’re prepared and that you’re safe. We had a great stunt team who worked on this film with us. Those guys really put us at ease.”
Sharing the explosive scene with Reynor were his co-stars Nicola Peltz and Mark Wahlberg.
“They worked so hard to make this huge explosion,” says Peltz, best known for her role as Bradley Martin on Bates Motel. “I think it took a week but we didn’t know about it. We were kind of confused when we got on set and saw ten cameras. (Director) Michael (Bay) told us a few minutes before, ‘You’re going to do this huge stunt. It’s not going to be stunt doubles, it’s going to be you guys and you have to run from here to here in 4.6 seconds.’
“There’s not much acting when there are real explosions behind you,” she says. “You just have to run.”
The experience of sprinting away from live blasts wasn’t exactly what Peltz expected when she signed on for the role in the fourth Transformers film.
“I thought there was going to be more green screen than there actually was but Michael wants everything to be as real as possible so the car chases and the explosions are all real.”
“You can really tell the difference,” says Reynor. “You can tell when a movie is really heavy on CG. It doesn’t really look real. As far as we’ve come with effects and all the advancements we’ve made—some of them are really great—at the end of the day to do it practically and do it for real always looks best on screen. That’s why Michael tries to make it that way. On top of that it makes everything more tangible for us; a lot easier to relate to and react off. That’s why I think these movies have been as incredibly successful as they have because the audience really does feel it.”
Director Michael Bay once said he doesn’t make movies for critics. The auteur behind such hits as The Rock, Armageddon, Bad Boys 1 and 2 and the Transformers movies is best known for making big, loud films that rake it in at the box office but leave critics reaching for the Advil.
Bay acknowledged the adversarial relationship in a 2005 article by Rene Rodriguez.
“They castrate me,” he told Rodriguez. “They call me the devil and all that crap.”
It’s not hard to see why reviewers have a hard time with his films. He never met a building or car or city he didn’t want to blow up in spectacular fashion and critics often feel like they have to slather on SPF 70 to avoid getting get a tan from the glare off the giant fireballs that light up screen in Bay’s films.
Audiences, however, have flocked to his flicks. According to boxofficemojo.com his ten features have grossed $1,898,048,525, or an average of $189,804,853. That’s a lot of beans.
The release this weekend of Transformers: Age of Extinction promises to add to those totals. The fourth installment of the franchise stars Mark Wahlberg as a single father and struggling inventor who discovers the deactivated Autobots leader Optimus Prime.
The movie promises a whole new raft of Transformers, including bounty hunter Lockdown and the rough and tumble Dinobot Grimlock. Bay promises we’ll also see an “angry Optimus Prime.”
Will the critics like Age of Extinction? Who knows? It probably won’t matter, the Transformers movies are as close to guaranteed hits as Hollywood has these days, so reviews most likely won’t matter to the box office.
Not all of Bay’s films have been critically reviled. “The critics were very nice to me when I first began with Bad Boys,” he says and his last movie, the crime drama Pain and Gain was called “the best movie Michael Bay’s ever made,” by the Newark Star-Ledger.
It has a few things going for it. First, there isn’t a robot in sight. Secondly, a great cast—including Wahlberg, Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson and Anthony Mackie—who bring serious star power and third, it doesn’t really feel like a Michael Bay film. And by that I mean there’s only one shot of the three leads walking away from a slow motion explosion.
Years ago I wrote this about his trademarked aural and optical onslaught: “The former commercial director has a knack for making everything look shiny but having great taste doesn’t make a great film director any more than great taste makes a Snicker’s bar a gourmet meal.” I even coined a word for his style: Hullabayloo, but nothing that any critic or I write matters to the director.
“I’ve actually stopped reading (reviews),” he told Rodriguez.
“Snitch” boils down America’s War on Drugs™ to a family drama, focusing on one muscle-bound man’s determination to wrestle a deal from a hard-nosed US Attorney and free his son from jail.
The Rock… er… Dwayne Johnson is John Matthews, owner of a successful construction company and estranged father to Jason (Rafi Gavron). Jason falls into a Kafka-esque legal loophole when his drug-dealing best friend implicates him as a trafficker in return for a break on jail time. Under America’s strict War on Drugs™ laws Jason is facing a mandatory ten-year sentence unless he gives up the name of a co-conspirator but because he’s innocent he has no one to snitch on. Enter John who gets the action underway when he asks the US Attorney (Susan Sarandon), “What if I do it for him? What if I help you make arrests?” Cue the cage match between The Rock and assorted drug dealers (including “The Wire’s” Omar, Michael Kenneth Williams).
Snitch isn’t a bad movie, but it is a miscast one. As charismatic as Johnson is, his physicality gets in the way here. The character is a determined regular Joe; a father willing to go to any lengths to help his son, but how much more effective would this story have been if he didn’t resemble a cop who could crash the drug dealers he’s working with between his muscular thumb and forefinger?
Imagine the part played by an actor who doesn’t look like a superhero. As someone whose fatherly instincts kick in when his son is at risk and you’d have a believable core to the story. While John’s concern for his son seems genuine enough, with his shaved head, goatee and bulging muscles Johnson is a bit too much of a mountain of a man to pull off the meek act he tries with the drug dealers. Looking like The Rock works against him here.
“Snitch” is a hybrid of message film and thriller. The message is a bit muddled, but the idea seems to be that the War on Drugs™ needs to find a new plan of attack. Maybe if there’s a sequel Johnson could play a General in the War on Drugs™. Dress him up like a soldier and send him off to hunt down cartel kingpins. Now that’s a part I could see him playing.
The film career of Dwayne Johnson a.k.a. The Rock is a bit of a mystery. He is charismatic, well known, talented but what he isn’t is a movie star. From his humble beginnings as an action wannabe in “The Mummy Returns” and “The Rundown” to his stab at mainstream success in “Be Cool” and art house cred in “Southland Tales” to his most recent incarnation as a children’s entertainer he always seems to be on the cusp of a real, sustainable a-list movie career, but never seems to be able to get over the final fame hurdle. His movies haven’t been consistent quality wise or commercially—“Southland Tales” cost 17 million and only made 273K at the b.o.—and, I don’t think his latest, “Tooth Fairy”, is going to do much to improve that situation.
Johnson is Derek Thompson, a former big league hockey star now playing for the Lansing, Michigan Ice Wolves. He’s the team’s enforcer, a hip checking bad boy knick named The Tooth Fairy for his habit of leaving his opponents with a mouth full of bloody Chiclets. After telling his girlfriend’s daughter that the tooth fairy doesn’t really exist he receives a summons from the Department of Dissemination of Disbelief and is sentenced to two weeks as a real tooth fairy as punishment for crushing kid’s dreams. Adapting to the wings and newfound special powers he comes to realize the importance of dreams and aspirations.
Originally titled “Sweet Tooth,” the script for “Tooth Fairy” has been kicking around Hollywood since the early nineties and was long rumored to be a vehicle for Arnold Schwarzenegger. The premise was slightly different, but the jokes would have been about the same: squeeze a large man into a pink tutu and let the hilarity begin. Except that there isn’t much hilarity to be had.
Old pros Billy Crystal and Julie Andrews—who plays the Fairy Godmother as a cross between Mary Poppins and Judge Judy—work the material for all it is worth, but aside from the odd giggle and Fairy pun—Fairy Krishna’s anyone?—this is a one joke movie that gets most of its mileage out of the image of a tough guy wrestler wearing gossamer wings.
It is, in many respects a sillier version of Dwayne Johnson’s biggest hit, “The Game Plan,” a movie about a sports star who learns to access his softer side, but “Tooth Fairy” is too soft. Johnson has become too kid friendly. He’s now just a big teddy bear, with a range of expression that wouldn’t be out of place in an English pantomime. I know kids enjoy bigger than life characters like Johnson. He’s kind of a real life super hero, but I’m not sure the acting career he imagined for himself when he was working with directors like F. Gary Gray and Richard Kelly would involve prancing about in a pink tutu for the delight of small kids.
It’s a living, but it’s not am a-list career. Somebody has to learn how to harness Johnson’s natural charisma and talent and finally put him in a good movie!
SYNOPSIS: Dwayne Johnson is John Matthews, owner of a successful construction company and estranged father to Jason (Rafi Gavron). Jason falls into a Kafka-esque legal loophole when his drug-dealing best friend implicates him as a trafficker in return for a break on jail time. Under America’s strict War on Drugs™ laws Jason is facing a mandatory ten-year sentence unless he gives up the name of a co-conspirator but because he’s innocent he has no one to snitch on. Enter John who gets the action underway when he says to the US Attorney (Susan Sarandon), “What if I do it for him? What if I help you make arrests?” Cue the cage match between The Rock and assorted drug dealers.
Star Ratings:
Richard: 2 ½ Stars
Mark: 3 Stars
Richard: Mark, Snitch isn’t a bad movie, but it is a miscast one. As charismatic as The Rock… er… Johnson is, his physicality gets in the way. The character is a determined regular Joe willing to go to any lengths to help his son. But how much more effective would it have been if he didn’t resemble a cop who could crash the drug dealers he’s working with between his muscular thumb and forefinger?
Mark: I wouldn’t say it was miscast, but that it was too obviously cast. Your idea of casting against type, as an everyman rather than an action hero, is a tantalizing one. I’m imagining how much more interesting a movie it would be with, say, Ryan Gosling, or even Paul Giamatti. The real question, however, is: When Susan Sarandon and Barry Pepper are support characters in a Dwayne Johnson movie, is this one of the signs of the apocalypse?
RC: Ha! I thought Pepper was OK but you could almost see Sarandon reaching for the pay cheque. She has seven movies coning out this year, and seems to have wedged this one in as she ran from set to set. Perhaps the movie’s message that the War on Drugs™ needs to find a new plan of attack appealed to her but she’s playing this one as a character straight out of Central Casting. What did you think of Jon Bernthal as the ex-con who gives The Rock a hand. Loved him on The Walking Dead and thought he was one of the best things about this movie, even if the conclusion to his story was far fetched.
MB: Well, he was the only one in the movie who brought an element of surprise to his scenes. As far as the story goes, I liked the premise, but I thought the storytelling was kind of sloppy and sometimes it felt like scenes were missing. The violence was restrained for this kind of movie, and I’m not sure if that’s a good or a bad thing. And the villains barely registered. They were mostly nasty in theory.
RC: I found the lack of violence refreshing. Given the name, the star and the idea you might have expected this to be a shoot ‘em up, and it isn’t. It’s a father and son story with a twist.
The beauty of the “Fast and the Furious” movies is their simplicity. The high concept of the new film can be summed up in a handful of words—a dead man’s brother seeks revenge on the Toretto gang—but fans don’t flock to the films for the story, they come to see the wild celebration of muscle cars, muscle shirts and muscle heads, and in this, “Furious 7” does not disappoint.
