ROAD WARRIORS,Fast & Furious road warriors
Anyone who’s endured the fist-waving ferocity of Perth traffic in the past few years, in which mums make like Vin Diesel just to drive their kids to school, knows the true meaning of the title of this long-running series. Fast & Furious, indeed.
But the franchise that kicked off in 2001 long ago left behind the real world and now rivals James Bond for globetrotting and international intrigue, with the former California street racers routinely employed on world-saving missions (the cars are now mere accessories).
Even with these radical gear shifts the smartypants behind the wheel of the Fast & Furious franchise have kept their audience strapped in, revving it up to outrageous levels but never jumping the shark in the way that Michael Bay has done with the Transformers series.
It is now the turn of Perth-raised horror-meister James Wan (Saw, Insidious, The Conjuring) to take Fast & Furious for a spin and he does a bang-up job, taking risks on insane action sequences but never losing control in blending live action — the signature of the series which began as a modestly budgeted street-racing film — and CGI.
Indeed, this achievement of mixing old school and new is most remarkable in the scenes of Paul Walker, who died midway through production. Wan has taken outtakes from earlier Fast & Furious movies as well as using doubles (including Walker’s two brothers Cody and Caleb) to give the impression the late actor was there for the entire movie.
Picking up from the London-set last episode, No. 7 sees an SAS-trained operative named Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham in his franchise debut) go after Diesel’s Dominic Toretto, Walker’s Brian O’Connor and their crew to avenge his brother’s death.
Toretto and the team have to get to Shaw before he gets to them. They make a deal with the head of an unnamed branch of the American secret service (Kurt Russell) to use a new piece of technology that can track anyone in the world at any time.
But they first have to rescue the genius who designed the system (not a pimply nerd but Game of Thrones babe Nathalie Emmanuel), in a race against the clock that takes the crew to Azerbaijan, Abu Dhabi and back to where it all began, the streets of Los Angeles.
The action is hilariously over the top, with Wan upping the ante on the already insane previous episodes with a gravity- defying sequence in which the crew drive their vehicles out of the back of a transport plane and skydive into a typically hyperbolic chase scene.
The craziness continues when the crew follow in the footsteps of Mission: Impossible and head to the Middle East, where Dominic and Brian (Walker) steal a multimillion-dollar supercar and instead of hitting the streets simply zoom from one skyscraper to the next.
Amid the mayhem there is plenty of time for bonding and comedy, which is perhaps the real reason for the success of the franchise (astutely it has kept together and added to the most multiracial cast in a blockbuster series).
And in saving the movie Wan has pulled off a fitting send-off for Walker, who brought a sensitive, slow-burn charisma to a series fuelled by testosterone.
Sometimes it takes the intervention of reality to provide fantasy with a bit of substance and humanity.
Fast & Furious 7 (M, 3.5 stars). opens today. Don’t miss Film Editor Mark Naglazas’ interview with Perth-raised director James Wan in Saturday’s Seven Days.
