Fast and Furious 8: The Fate of the Furious, the latest chapter in Universal’s box office–throttling franchise, is a clinic in lunacy, destruction, and unbridled joy. In other words, it lives to up the Fast & Furious legacy.
Director F. Gary Gray has the keys this time around, and gives the franchise a gut punch of a twist: Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) has turned on his team and, under the command of the nuclear winter blonde villain known as Cipher (Charlize Theron), threatens to destroy the Furious family and everything we love about them.
Gray has a keen understanding of the Furious world. The Fate of the Furious is more self-aware than its predecessors, and belligerently absurd in the best way possible. But even though it has a really fun, twisty concept and a great villain, it doesn’t always know how to handle all these moving parts.
The Fate of the Furious isn’t the best Fast & Furious film (it probably lands in the top half of the franchise’s eight films), but it’s still worth seeing, and fans, especially Furious’s loyal Lambo-loving steeds, will be satisfied.
Since its slate-wiping fourth instalment in 2009, the Fast & Furious films have been the place to go for quick-cut, shakily-shot, CGI-smothered cartoon excess that just happens to involve cars of some sort – and they’re invariably propelled across the finish line, if and when they are, by their outsize sense of fun and likeable ensemble cast. The fact the franchise hadn’t produced a single comprehensibly shot and edited car chase in the last eight years was by-the-by – or at least it was, until Mad Max: Fury Road (and others, not least of all the John Wick films) reminded us just how exhilarating this stuff can be when done right.
Hence, perhaps, the sheepish-feeling tribute to George Miller’s film with which Fast & Furious 8 rounds things up. It’s like watching the child with the biggest mouth in school suddenly realise he has to walk the walk – and managing, just about, though in a way that makes it slightly harder to look him in the eye afterwards. Director F. Gary Gray (Straight Outta Compton, the 2003 remake of The Italian Job) commits the sequence to a Fury Road level of spectacle, and has some uproarious ideas up his sleeve, probably better discovered in the heat of the cinematic moment than in the third paragraph of a middling review.
Its other consolation is Statham. Deckard Shaw is an unexpectedly vibrant addition, even if his presence undercuts everything which made his debut appearance in Fast & Furious 6 so tense. No matter – a shootout involving his character arrives so boldly within the running time it lassos the film from under everybody’s noses, evoking underrated Clive Owen thriller Shoot ‘Em Up (2006) and solidifying him as 2015 comedy Spy’s ace in the pack. Hilariously, there’s not even a car in sight. The petition for a Deckard Shaw spin-off begins here.
The Fast & Furious series became the money maker it is because, in many ways, it was the huge franchise that couldn’t which in turn transformed it into something Diesel and company could never have anticipated. If all involved are in on the joke, it’s in danger of wearing as thin as the ice the gang find themselves speeding along breathlessly in the climactic set-piece (one word: submarine).
Helen Mirren has a larky cameo as Deckard’s mother – think Eastenders’ Peggy Mitchell with extra vinegar – and is somehow better served than poor Charlize Theron, whose flaxen-haired super-hacker Cipher spends her scenes waxing gnomic on the subject of fate, peering at Toretto, and generally doing anything but drive or hack. The team’s tech pixie Ramsey (an underused Nathalie Emmanuel) contrasts Cipher unfavourably to the cyber-activist group Anonymous, but anonymous is exactly what she is: her scheme could potentially end all life on Earth, but it’s treated with no more urgency than any of the series’ other heists with personal stakes attached.
Theron’s Imperator Furiosa was the blackened, aching soul of Fury Road. In Fast & Furious 8, she’s hissing orders at underlings and growling lines like “It’s zombie time.” It isn’t – not quite – but one sympathises.
