‘Fate of the Furious’ Less Than the Sum of Its Parts

Open on Havana. It’s a “Fast and Furious” movie, so the sun is shining, the music is blasting, the colors are bright, everyone’s having fun, and none of the women in this crowd of hundreds are wearing clothes below the upper thigh. There’s a villain, of course, with an expensive car. The hero, Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel), is going to race him in the Cuban Mile. Engines roar. Dom will win, of course, in some appropriately dramatic way—in this case, driving a burning junkyard car backwards across the finish line. The villain sees the error of his ways. The crowd applauds. Cue upbeat Cuban music.

The film should have ended there. This opening sequence was spectacular. It took practically all of the franchise’s standout features—vibrant urban scenes, beautiful cars, thrilling race footage—and compressed them into a simple but outstanding ten minutes. And unlike the rest of the film, it was actually about car racing.

Unfortunately, there’s a lot of movie left to go at this point. Enter Charlize Theron as “Cipher,” a silly villain name that will only be used in quotes for the rest of this review, spouting a mix of plot synopsis (“You’re going to betray your brothers, abandon your code, and shatter your family”) and otherwise inexcusably bad dialogue (“This is fate”). It’s nice that Theron is the franchise’s first female villain, and her performance isn’t exactly bad, but she’s saddled with the worst parts of the film’s worst aspect—its plot.

Why does “Cipher” need Dom to help her in a convoluted nuclear scheme that requires little to no skill at driving cars? No good reason. Why doesn’t Dom, coerced by “Cipher” into this elaborate plot, simply tell his friends what’s going on? No good reason. If you have a “Why” question about this film, odds are the answer is going to be “No good reason.”

Organizationally, the storyline of “The Fate of the Furious” is a mess. The main plot with Diesel and Theron is terrible. Luke Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) and Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham) seem to be characters in what would have been a perfectly good buddy cop movie if it weren’t jammed into one of the subplots. The rest of Dom’s crew flails around in the background, mostly useless except for occasional comic relief.

Still, nobody’s really watching these things for the plot. How does “Fate of the Furious” do on spectacle? The core concepts for action sequences are generally excellent: a car chase ended by a swinging wrecking ball, a bunch of cars hacked and turned into a self-driving zombie convoy in the streets of New York, and a car chase across thin ice with a submarine below. But in implementation—and here new director F. Gary Gray deserves a bit of blame—they don’t quite pop the way the standout scenes in “Fast Five” or “Furious 7” did.

The execution isn’t exactly bad. There’s a delightful sequence of self-driving cars flinging themselves out of the upper stories of parking garages, for instance, with an inspired shot of one car’s proximity sensor suddenly detecting the street as it falls towards it. But in general, the action sequences lack the “wow” factor of those in the prior installment, and they definitely lack the careful management of tension that characterized the franchise’s best film, “Fast Five.”

There are other good parts besides action sequences. There’s a truly hilarious scene reintroducing Hobbs at the beginning of the movie in which he has taken up coaching a terrifying girls’ soccer team, watched by a bevy of lustful mothers. “There seems to be more moms than kids,” another character comments. Practically every scene between Hobbs and Shaw is golden. “I will beat you like a Cherokee drum,” Hobbs threatens Shaw, superhuman muscles conveniently flexing. “Good luck with that, Hercules,” Shaw responds, in a jab at one of Johnson’s past roles.

Actors who aren’t Statham and Johnson have good moments too. A scene near the climax in which several characters attempt to power down a Russian sub and find that the controls are in Russian is genuinely funny. Even Theron gets one good scene, giving Dom a gun, daring him to shoot her, and then cowing him with a quiet, even-toned monologue.

“Fate of the Furious” is littered with good moments. Unfortunately, they’re all jammed into this silly superspy story and don’t work as part of a cohesive whole. At the end of the day, “The Fast and the Furious” is supposed to be about cars. So the endemic misunderstanding of the kinds of things cars can be expected to do—a misunderstanding that by this point sees the gang morphed, with little acknowledgement of the change over the course of the franchise, from street racers into black ops superspies—has pushed the franchise out of its area of expertise and into an unflattering comparison with other spy franchises.

When I reviewed the last installment of this franchise, I warned that “Furious 7” had reached the limits of audience suspension of disbelief. Continuing in this direction would mean a diminution in quality. It gives me only a little pleasure to be proven right: While “Fate of the Furious” maintains the same approximate quality in many of its scenes, it falls short as a whole.

—Staff writer J. Thomas Westbrook can be reached at thomas.westbrook@thecrimson.com.