It might have been infinitely more easy to turn Fast and Furious 7 into a long-winding tribute to Paul Walker, who died in a car accident a little over a year ago. After 14-odd years of bonding over cars and chases and Hollywood, you’d expect it of them. But thankfully, they’ve managed to keep the tribute down to a brief couple of minutes, at the end, opting to have Brian O’Connor (Paul Walker) drive off into the sunset and not be killed. And it’s a lot of work keeping him alive because they shot the film for four body doubles and his brothers.
Truth be told, Brian has so many brushes with death through the film that you wonder each time if this was it. To write his character off without using a funeral scene was a nice touch. Everybody likes a happy ending, even in a film that thrives on muscle - both under the hood and on the arms.
Fast 7 picks up where the last film left off - with Jason Statham entering the series by killing one of the original team members. Statham is an ex-SAS assassin who is out to kill the men who maimed his kid brother, the younger Shaw who was left maimed by Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and Co in the last film. After a couple of run-ins with Statham, Toretto takes up the offer from CIA super spook Kurt Russel, who is hunting for a hacker called Ramsey. Kidnapped by mercenaries for her software called the God’s Eye, which can locate any man on the face of the earth, she’s rescued by Toretto and his band of car-ripping renegades after an intense action sequence - that involved everything from parachuting cars from planes onto a single lane mountain road, hitting a mini army and driving off a cliff.
The scene moves to West Asia where more horsepowered mayhem ensues as Dom and Brian retrieve the software from the supercar of a Jordanian prince - by driving it out the wall of his penthouse, some 200 stories in the air, into the next building and then the next. Take that Tom Cruise.
With all revenge dramas, you’ve got to make a final stand. And that final stand is all about cars, speed and adrenaline-pumping action. Throw Dwayne Johnson and a few crowd-pleasing one-liners into the mix and it’s a combination that’ll deliver every single cheap thrill that the franchise has delivered on these past 15 years.
While it’s a pity that Paul Walker won’t be there for the next one, the bright side is they seem to be full of ideas on how to use cars to create more and more carnage. God bless their ingenuity because they’ll be back with more.