As the roaring engines engulf us in all the glory of multi-channel surround, it becomes evidently clear that this particular game of chicken is destined for only one conclusion: the two cars smashing directly into each other. After all, one car is driven by Vin Diesel and the other is driven by Jason Statham, and neither one of those postmodern action movie stalwarts is going to play a character who will be the “chicken.” And smash into each other they do—violently, gloriously, ridiculously. In the real world, both men would be dead (or, with the use of air bags, alive with significant internal injuries and crushed legs), but this is the world of the fast and the furious, where the laws of physics don’t matter and hard bodies are so hard that they don’t really register physical damage (even when Dom is nearly killed in a collapsing building, he displays no more bodily damage than a trickle of blood from his forehead). Both Dom and Shaw get out of their mangled vehicles and prepare to continue mano-a-mano, a bout of street fight fisticuffs that is ultimately interrupted primarily so that it may commence again at the film’s climax.

This scene speaks volumes about Furious Seven and how the Fast and Furious franchise has evolved, namely into the realm of absolute cartoonishness. The series has always flirted with the absurd, giving us heroes and antiheroes and outright villains who can maneuver tricked-out sports cars in ways that defy the laws of physics and sometimes common sense. The best film in the series, Fast Five (2011), managed a nearly perfect balance between the physical presence of actual stunts and computer-manipulated mayhem. Not surprisingly, the series has persisted in a game of one-upmanship, with each subsequent film trying to create action sequences more visceral and outlandish than the one before. The problem is that there is a law of diminishing returns, and here in the seventh installment we have finally reached the point where the action is so ridiculous, so exaggerated, so utterly divorced from reality that it fails to fully engage us sensually and emotionally. It’s all pixel-driven bombast.

When Dom and his partner, cop-turned-outlaw-turned-outlaw-hero Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker) drove a car off a massive cliff in Fast Five, it was an outrageous escape solution that worked because we could sense the reality of real drivers driving a real car off a real cliff. Director Justin Lin engaged us in the moment in a way that stuck, and the scene has become its own kind of classic. In Furious Seven, there is a sequence in Abu Dhabi in which Dom and Brian drive a stolen sports car through the window of a massive high rise, hundreds of feet in the air, through the window of another high rise, and then out the other side again into yet a third high rise. The idea is preposterous, and the film does nothing to convince us that is might just be real. It is all green-screen and manipulated pixels, which rips us out of what has made this series so good for so long. Spielberg and Lucas did the same thing with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008), sacrificing the immediacy of the series’ primary reliance on stuntwork and locations for a CGI jungle that felt at all times like a CGI jungle. Bigger, as it turns out, isn’t always better when it fundamentally alters the nature of the medium. This is not to say that CGI hasn’t previously played a role in the series; in fact, the very first film, The Fast and the Furious (2001), featured quite a bit of CG, but it was always hidden and used in service of enhancing the stunts. Nearly fifteen years later, what stuntwork remains is at the service of the computer graphics.

Visuals aside, the story in Furious Seven, once again penned by Chris Morgan (who was written every installment since the third, 2006’s Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift, builds off of the previous film, keeping its focus on international plotting and black ops intrigue. Dom and O’Brien, mourning the death of one of their own at Shaw’s hands, are enlisted by a secretive government agent who calls himself Mr. Nobody (Kurt Russell) to track down and rescue a computer hacker named Ramsey (Nathalie Emmanuel) who has created a device that allows her to simultaneously hack into every single camera and surveillance system in the world. Retrieving this device would keep it safe from terrorists like the one played by Djimon Honsou, but Dom and company are also promised its use to track down Shaw and kill him. Thus, Dom and his family switch roles from hunted to hunter, although those roles will reverse again before the film is over.

Ramsey is the only new addition of note this time around, as the film is largely content to rest on familiar faces: Michelle Rodriguez’s Letty, who is still struggling with her lack of memory after literally returning from the dead; Tyrese Gibson’s and Chris “Ludacris” Bridges’s Roman and Tej, still squabbling like an old married couple; and Jordana Brewster’s Mia, who is reluctant to tell Brian that she is pregnant again because she fears that he is already wearying of domestic life (the film’s one good visual joke involves Brian flooring it ... in a minivan). Dwayne Johnson also returns as hulking government agent Hobbs, who spends a good deal of time in intensive care, although not so long that he can’t re-emerge for the big climax, which allows him to do his best Arnold Schwarzenegger impression by single-handedly manning a rotary cannon intended for mounting on a helicopter. He also gets to bark a few good lines.

Filling the shoes of long-time director Justin Lin, who bowed out after four installments, is horror maestro James Wan (Saw, Insidious), who would seem to be an odd choice to helm the new installment of an action movie franchise. However, Wan’s vigilante thriller Death Sentence (2007) proved that he could stage big action sequences in addition to grisly scares, although much of what he orchestrates in Furious Seven feels unsurprisingly rote. The series at this point has its own aesthetic, and Wan is there primarily to direct traffic. Of course, this entry has the unavoidable poignancy of being the last one to feature Paul Walker’s Brian, since the actor died in a car crash during filming back in 2012. Seeing Walker for the last time in a series he has helped to define is undeniably sad, and the last five minutes of Furious Seven is less a conclusion to the series than it is a paean to Walker. It is certainly a deserved one, although I can’t help but think that he also deserved a better movie on which to go out.

Copyright ©2015 James Kendrick

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