65% on Rotten Tomatoes (out of 174 reviews)
Runtime: 136 long agonizing minutes
Directed by: F. Gary Gray, although you couldn't tell this was the case
Starring: Hell, by now you should know who the main players are
From: Universal
I know that most will disagree... I enjoyed most of the movies in this series, but I thought this was the worst one. This film made me angry. See why below:
One day I'll do new reviews of most of the movies in this franchise. I'll just say now that 1 and 4 are fine, 2 and 3 aren't good, 5 and 6 are a lot of fun (although once I watch them again I may not rate them as highly as I do now), and 7 was sadly mediocre, although I definitely understand why due to the horrid circumstances and I actually rated it a little higher than I normally would have as it was a great poignant ending as they wrote off Paul Walker's character and also said goodbye to Paul Walker the human being. As for this motion picture, you can tell by my score, I thought this was pretty terrible. I mean, Tokyo Drift suddenly doesn't seem so bad to me anymore.
Everyone by now should know the general plot of how Dom Toretto betrays his “family” and works with Charlize Theron. You find out in the film that her character's name is... Cipher. Really. How brilliant... I won't reveal anything else about major plot points but I can say that most of what comes out of Cipher's mouth is pretty atrocious. It's either the most basic of dialogue or crap that's supposed to be profound but sounds like the drivel from some college student who just tried pot for the first time. I am one of the few people on the planet who didn't love Fury Road but I'd much rather watch that again than this, and they definitely used Theron's talents better there than here.
The rest of the film, the script is absolutely atrocious. For me it wasn't fun and instead our heroes came across as either dumbasses or obnoxious buffoons. The biggest problem, though, is the plot and how stupid it is. It goes far above the stupidity of 5 through 7-which I always wished would have been smarter but at least they were entertaining-and this was just insufferable and so devoid of logic it insulted my intelligence. While some moments are so absurd they almost become humorous, the movie made me sigh and shake my head often. By far the worst moment was something that happened in the middle of the film. It was so stupid it broke the movie (and the fact that this doesn't happen again when by all rights this person should be doing it whenever possible) makes it all the worse.
The more I think about this motion picture, the worse it gets. As I drove home I realized that at the end something happens which pretty much betrays the entire series and makes all our “heroes” look like gigantic A-holes who must not have really cared about someone... I know most won't feel this way but I don't watch superhero movies as I don't give a damn about them so-to steal a thought-these characters becoming more and more like superheroes and being unrealistically unstoppable holds little interest for me, and there's a lot of that here. Before this, plenty of trailers were shown, and it reminded me how these big-budget Hollywood movies are mostly not for me anymore; they are more about spectacle and destruction-porn than anything else, and I just don't care.
To me, this series was like me recently and got a flat tire and had to pull into a parking lot to put on a spare. Yet, I know that there is enough of the general public who just don't know any better or backwards hat wearing douchebros with their stanced cars and their body reeking of Axe body spray who will make this not only a gigantic hit, but also beloved. No offense to those reading this here who have seen this already and love it or will love it once they get around to seeing this... personally this reminded me of all the problems Hollywood has and how most of these movies with bloated budgets just aren't entertaining for me, when that wasn't always the case.
Here, it has the same problem 7 did where too many of the action scenes are too difficult to made out because of the idiotic way they were filmed, and as I speculated back in January, xXx: The Return of Xander Cage was better as a film to be enjoyed by those who love things like Fast Five than The Fate of the Furious; I just had no idea it'd be MUCH better. I know I am out on an island with this opinion but I have to be honest. I'll still be nice and say that those who will be watching this theatrically, you'll get more out of this than I did, and you won't be aggravated or annoyed by the lame humor or rankled by how this is yet another brainless plot we get so often from big Hollywood motion pictures... you'll think this franchise hasn't run out of gas, in other words.
No comments:
Post a Comment