The idiots who pay to see Fast & Furious movies aren’t going to turn in their idiot cards and develop a sense of taste any time soon. The F9 trailer speaks for itself. The people behind it — principally Justin Lin, the cyborg whore who’s now directed five of these fucking things — help found the satanic death monkey training school that Godzilla vs. Kong‘s Adam Wingard graduated from a few years ago.
Eternal shame upon the F9 cast members who are capable of feeling it: Vin Diesel (does anyone recall his genuinely winning performance in a sublime little Sidney Lumet film called Find Me Guilty?), Michelle Rodriguez, Tyrese Gibson, Chris ‘Ludacris’ Bridges, John Cena, Jordana Brewster, Nathalie Emmanuel, Sung Kang, Helen Mirren and Charlize Theron.
Excerpts from “Gleeful Action Porn Provides Glimpse Into Hell,” posted on 3.31.15:
James Wan‘s Furious 7 (Universal, 4.3) is, of course, a cyborg muscle-car flick made for people who despise real action flicks and prefer, instead, the comfort of cranked-up, big-screen videogame delirium inhabited (I don’t want to say “performed”) by flesh-and-blood actors and facilitated by a special kind of obnoxious CG fakeitude that grabs you by the shirt collar and says “eat this, bitch!”
I hated, hated, hated this film like nothing I’ve seen in a long time.
“What’s wrong with silly, stupid four-wheel fun?” the fans ask. What’s wrong is that movies like this are deathly boring and deflating and toxic to the soul. They’re anti-fun, anti-life, anti-cinema, anti-everything except paychecks.
Furious 7 is odious, obnoxious corporate napalm on a scale that is better left undescribed. It is fast, flashy, thrompy crap that dispenses so much poison it feels like a kind of plague. Wan’s film is certainly a metaphor for a kind of plague that has been afflicting action films for a good 20-plus years.
In Act 3, Scene 2 of William Shakespeare‘s Julius Caesar, Marcus Brutus is asked by a crowd of alarmed plebians why he conspired to murder their leader. “T’was not that I loved Caesar less,” Brutus answers, “but that I loved Rome more.” By the same token I spit upon Furious 7 and the whole cyborg action muscle-boy genre not because I love sitting through cranked-up, power-pump, beyond-silly action flicks less (although my feelings of revulsion are as sincere as a heart attack) but because I love real action movies more.