MOVIE REVIEW – Vin Diesel, Dwayne Johnson, Jason Statham and Michelle Rodriguez returns in the eighth installment of the Fast&Furious series to face off against an ice-cold and cruel, yet, sexy Charlize Theron. The Fate of the Furious has gone far from the original car racing, „Need for Speed” formula, yet, it’s still the same action-packed, video game-like movie…

Vin Diesel may have about two expressions in his acting inventory, but we have to admit that he is still capable of being the star in his everlasting Fast&Furious series. Yet, what else can we expect in this supercar action movie than what we have seen seven times already?

Charlize steals Vin (and the show)

The set-up: Dom, Vin Diesel’s sonorous-voiced super driver with a heart of gold, is living in Cuba with his girl-friend, Letty (Michelle Rodriguez). Life is sweet indeed, and they think of starting a family, but crashing into view comes Charlize Theron’s Cipher, a tech-savant terrorist, whose skill with a keyboard would make Anonymous blush with envy. With one swipe of her smartphone, she’s blackmailed Dom with some inconvenient detail from his past, and he’s soon helping her steal a series of powerful doohickeys that together might just bring about nuclear destruction.

Standing in Dom’s way in this endeavor are his old racing pals, containing Dwayne Johnson’s law-enforcement-officer turned speed-racer, and – in a nice twist – Deckard Shaw, Jason Statham’s big bad from the last outing, now performing the role of acid-tongued antihero.

Is it bigger? Better? Faster?

I don’t want to spoil anymore, and there’s isn’t much to spoil about the both non-sensical and brain dead story anyway. But what about the action? Well, with every episode of “Fast and Furious” we expect that the latest movie will be bigger and more enjoyably nonsensical than the last. The miniskirts will be shorter, the toys zoomier, the stunts more delirious. Yet, like every successful series, this one delivers its sleek new bits and pieces in reassuringly familiar packaging.

While James Bond has his queen and country, Vin Diesel’s Dominic Toretto — the monotonal “Fast and Furious” paterfamilias — has cars and camaraderie. It’s an ideal combo for movies about American outsiders whose home has always been one another.

Familiar

Indeed, the “family” is the most important word in these movies, the one that’s dropped with moist emotion and hushed Sunday-sermon reverence. It’s the idea that has held the franchise together — movie to movie, race to race, prayer to prayer — in an episodic soap about kith, kin and custom cars.

It’s what connects this franchise to its fans, another kind of family, though one that pays to sit down at the table. It’s what has always bound Dom to his wife, Letty (Michelle Rodriguez), and the rest of his crew, most crucially Brian, the cop-turned-soul-partner played by Paul Walker, who died in an off-set car collision in 2013.

The two outsiders are the best

Jason Statham’s inclusion is F8’s smartest move, his snarky one-liners, and aptitude for hand-to-hand combat helping to break up the sometimes exhausting in-car sequences. Indeed, there’s one gloriously goofy action sequence, where Shaw battles his way through a plane full of goons, which equals anything from the adrenalised mania of Statham’s Crank films.

Charlize Theron as well has great fun with the nefarious Cipher, despite the character often seeming drawn-on-the-back-of-a-napkin flimsy. She does an awful lot with very little, purring out extended monologs about choice theory and human nature just like Malcolm Gladwell with access to the nuclear football. And there’s an enormously entertaining cameo from Helen Mirren, channeling her inner Pat Butcher as the gobby mother of Statham’s Shaw.

Action starts as Need for Speed, yet, ends like a present-day Mad Max

Of course, these brief flourishes of character acting are merely aperitifs to F8’s main course: to batter you into submission with pyrotechnic set pieces. There are three here, of which one – a confusingly edited sequence on the Siberian wastes – falls somewhat flat. Better is an opening sequence in which Diesel races a supercar with a nitrous-oxide-fuelled old banger, which should appeal to anyone who enjoyed the franchise in its early, motor-obsessed iterations.

And, in the film’s central set piece, Cipher hacks into seemingly every car in New York City and points them in the direction of a motorcade protecting the Russian defense minister. There’s a convincing thriller to be made about our technophobia around the self-driving-car revolution. Make no mistake, F8 isn’t it; but it’s still an effective – and spectacular – scene.

Family, family, and family

Oh, and there’s further good news: if you’re playing the Fast & Furious drinking game, where you take a shot every time Vin says “family,” you’ll be drunk as a skunk in no time. Talking about a win-Vin situation…

-BadSector-