America’s military ambitions proliferate through the country’s blockbuster cinema lately; the latter is a nice front, if nothing else, but here’s the thing: a movie’s politics is largely a moot point, but if a film assumes the form of advertising, then you wonder aloud about the wares it is peddling.
Let’s see, then. A group of characters who define themselves largely through martial nomenclature: “chief”, “captain”, “leader”; divide themselves into specialist positions: the drivers, foot soldiers, spies, technicians; drop off into “enemy” territories with parachutes from choppers and finally, mutter battlefield-slogans to each other: “a war is coming”, “I don’t have friends, I have family”. Fast and Furious 7 (or Furious 7, as it is largely called) is a film, that like a lot of other blockbuster movies of recent times, centres around geopolitical conflicts, secret forces agents and surveillance technology; it also features choppers, mercenaries, heavy-duty ammunition, drones and the customary incursion into West Asia (the land of the great 21st villains in American movie-mythology). This is to say, it is very much a men-on-a-mission war film, but without the uniforms.
The film is supposed to be driven primarily by a vendetta-plot. Deckard Shaw, a rogue secret forces agent returns to exact revenge upon Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel does what Vin Diesel does) and his crew for having killed his brother — an international terrorist — in the last film. He is hidden and dangerous: “a shadow”, “a ghost”, and Dominic doesn’t know where to find him. The US Secret Services (led by an incredible Kurt Russell, been there, done that) arrive at the scene and make him an offer: get us a super-sentient surveillance software and we will use it to locate Shaw for you. Naturally, Dominic agrees and dives headlong into hardcore military missions: abduction in Azerbaijan, robbery in Jordan, with his eager group of friends.
The film is at its most interesting when it is self-aware of its nature as the final film in a decade-and-a-half long, seven-part franchise. This imbues the film with a sense of history, an inherently cultivated mythology, a set of rituals and codes unique to the world of the film — much like a long-running sitcom where members of the audience can anticipate an oncoming gag or a character’s eccentricity because they have seen it before. Historically, too, each succeeding film in a film franchise is generally enriched by the rules developed by the preceding titles. This also renders the conversations the characters have in Furious 7 with intimacy that would generally be impossible to achieve in a stand-alone film; sample this: Dominic and Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) are driving and in the distance, spot a huge fair. Letty, who has lost her memory, asks Dominic: “Did we come here often?” and he replies, “Come here? We invented this place.” A line like this will mean very little without the context of the previous films, a fact also used to engineer a sentimental epitaph to Paul Walker, who died in the middle of the shooting, and whose appearance throughout the film is perhaps its greatest special effect.
I saw the first film in the series as a teenager, and I saw the last as a grown man, but I only ever saw traces and brief flashes of the films in the middle. To me, the series’ complete transformation in the past 15 years is slightly disorienting. It was earlier a small film about a LA subculture, a community of underground race-car fanatics and their internal ceremonies and mores, but in 2015, these guys have become hot-stepping, all-purpose mercenaries with the capability of triggering an international war. I am not certain if this is the result of natural progression or gradual evolution, but I do believe a film’s increasing success should allow it to delve deeper into the world it originally inhabited, as opposed to letting it become another beast altogether. More and more, it seems, Hollywood makes movies a certain way because it can, instead of, because it should.
The writer is programmer, Lightcube Film Society
