SPOILER IF YOU CLICK THROUGH: Two days ago (Friday 5.12) Jeff Sneider tweeted the following about a minor, “who cares?”, barely-worth-raising-your-eyebrows-about FAST X spoiler:
Let me explain something. TheWrap‘s Umberto Gonzalez spoiling anything in any Fast franchise film is an excellent thing, a wonderful thing, a thing to sing and shout about.
Anyone who derides, dismisses or flips off, even in a small or insignificant way, this wretched franchise is, in my eyes, doing God’s work.
I’ve been saying for years that the Fast movies are utterly evil. And yet they still have an ardent following. So let me expand my definition. Aside from Rob Coen‘s respectable The Fast and the Furious (’01) which I recognized as a winningly unpretentious Samuel Arkoff-style exploitation film, the Fast franchise has been ghastly.
Anyone who’s sincerely loved the Fast films all along and eagerly looks forward to catching the next one has poison in his/her veins.
Posted on 4.14.21: “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.”
Former Miami Herald critic Rene Rodriguez, on the other hand, was man enough to lay it on the line: “In Furious 7, the unstoppable franchise sputters and stalls, edging from spectacular, tongue-in-cheek B-movie fun to soulless, insulting inanity. Here is a film in which nothing is at stake: Cars crash into each other head-on at high speeds, vehicles sail off cliffs and tumble down rocky mountainsides, people jump out of buildings and fall six stories to the ground, then characters just dust themselves off and continue as if nothing had happened. [The film] plunges free-fall into absurd, cartoonish nonsense.”
The last one I saw was Furious 7, and I hate myself for doing so.
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.
“I hated the first 65 minutes of Furious 7 so much that I was literally twitching and flinching in my seat and making little squeaky moaning sounds. I was checking my watch every five minutes, wondering how much more of this crap I could take. I was firing psychic hate grenades at the screen.
“All I wanted were two or three half-assed simulations of serious fast-car realism…you know, a little Drive nostalgia, a little Gone In Sixty Seconds action, a little Bullitt, even a taste of 2001’s The Fast and the Furious. Or a replay of that truck-chase sequence in J.C. Chandor‘s A Most Violent Year, which I loved. But no. Wasn’t in the cards, hasn’t been for years. Exploitation cyborgs like Wan and particularly Justin Lin, the cinematic anti-Christ who directed five Fast/Furious flicks between ’06 to ’13, have become death…the destroyer of worlds.
“So I bolted at the 65-minute mark. I really couldn’t take any more. I wanted to see the big parachuting-cars sequence and get a sense of how Paul Walker‘s performance felt and basically see how it played for an hour. But enough was enough. I stepped around Peter Sciretta, ran out, jumped on the bike and drove home at sensible speeds.”
