“Whatever you do, don’t think,” advises a character in The Fate of the Furious – helpful advice while being assaulted with gravity-defying stunts that become increasingly preposterous and eventually lose their sheen through repetition.
Over a decade into one of Hollywood’s longest running action franchises, the average age of the lead characters has reached the middle forties. Yet none of them is anymore worse for wear.
More important than the plot machinations is how inventively Dom (Vin Diesel) and director F Gary Gray are able to have cars outrace, smash and bang each other.
After the events of the previous film, the last to feature Paul Walker’s character, Dom and Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) are relaxing in Havana for their honeymoon. Why Cuba? Because two beautiful classic cars look perfect racing through the country’s narrow lanes. There are even talks of a child in the racer couple’s quiet idyll (A safety plan for future instalments, perhaps?)
But after being involved in so many death-defying missions, Dom has one too many enemies to allow for a quiet retreat into the night. With one video on a smartphone, Dom is convinced by the film’s antagonist, the super hacker Cipher (Charlize Theron), to betray Letty, Luke (Dwayne Johnson) and crew and help her build up a nuclear arsenal so that she has bargaining power with the world’s superpowers.
Cipher guides her ward on a globe-trotting adventure, keeping her location secret by using encryption technology. Thrown into the mix of a range of nasty things happening to increasingly expensive vehicles is a cat-and-mouse cyber crime thriller, the mechanics of which are explained by the characters to each other in a clunky section. As Dom goes rogue, the US authority stand-in figure Mr Nobody (Kurt Russell), aided by his protege (Scott Eastwood), recruit members of Dom’s gang to take on their former partner.
In the film’s best casting decision Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham), the villain of the previous film, joins his nemesis, convinced in no small part by his mother (Helen Mirren).
When the action falters, like it does in the final sequence along a frozen water body in Russia, the camaraderie between the characters and goofy one-liners sustain the narrative. Better than a sequence involving self-driving vehicles being hacked is a comic scene featuring Statham’s character doling out cheesy quips in the midst of high-stakes action on a plane. The action star lets the expletives fly, and though the effect is dampened by frequent bleeps, it perfectly accentuates the gun-play. The backdoor is firmly left open for a future entry, and provided it’s fuelled by the nitro-boosters so beloved to Dom and his crew, the franchise might still have legs.