In Which This Revolting Tribute To Paul Walker Turns Our Stomach

Juggernaut

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Furious 7
director James Wan
137 minutes

On the night Paul Walker died, Vin Diesel ate the following: six scones, a generous cut of lamb, ice cream and a bald eagle. Afterwards, he felt bloated, but not too bloated to perform his signature role of Dominic Toretto. As Dominic, Diesel drives a car off a mountain, drives a car through several Abu Dhabi skyscrapers, killing various pedestrians in the process, and finally drives a car off a ramp into a helicopter. He survives all these collisions without any medical attention whatsoever. You will be forgiven for asking yourself the following question, the same question Jon Hamm's wife asks herself on a hourly basis: "Is he bragging?"

Diesel's head looks like it is on the verge of expanding so far sideways that he will become a deft mixture of Juggernaut and Stevie Van Zandt. Shortly before Vin drives that car into the helo, a CGI representation of Paul Walker fights an Asian guy. Walker's scenes were assembled by cutting in other scenes from the movie, using his brothers as  stunt doubles and copious CGI. The end result is both technically impressive and entirely lacking, since it looks as close as it can to real while we know it is fake. The Uncanny Valley was the original nickname for Diesel at Harvard.

The right move would have been to kill off Paul Walker's character, to show that insane stunts with vehicles, and often just regular driving, can frequently lead to death. Then again, watching Diesel grunt his way through a dense forest in a muscle car while Jason Statham's face looks like an emote is probably enough of a PSA instructing us that no one should ever get behind the wheel again.

The recent analysis of the Furious 7 audience proved that the massive audience for these films is mainly non-white. Furious 7 is a lot more about class, however, attempting to prove that a professional behavior and attitude is not necessarily the best way of accomplishing our goals as a society. About an hour into the movie, Kurt Russell, 64, shows up as if to put the exclamation point on this moving theme.

Kurt's skin looks like a sesame bagel, and he is weirdly miscast in a Judi Dench-like role. Besides the incredibly unversatile Statham, the only other villain of any interest is portrayed by Djimon Hounsou, 50. Because he is the sole person in the cast with even the most basic level of acting ability, he sticks out like a sore thumb and sounds ridiculous.

Furious 7 begins when Statham mails a bomb to Vin's house. No one dies (no one ever dies in this movie, they only perish off screen from its themes and poor performances), but Vin is extremely upset. He visits his friend Hobbs in the hospital (a steroid-infected Dwayne Johnson) who gives him instructions on how to avenge The Rock's broken arm.

Vin, his amnesia-stricken GF (Michelle Rodriguez, 36, looking embarrassed to be a part of this) and his friends Ludacris and Tyrese all drop out of an airplane, already in their cars, into Azerbaijan. They land on a steep mountain road. Paul Walker almost dies right then by falling off a cliff, but Michelle drives the back of her car over the edge so he has something to grab onto. "Thank you," he says.

Between action sequences director James Wan includes lengthy phone conversations between Paul Walker and his wife Mia (Jordana Brewster, 34) about how she is pregnant and wants him to be home with her instead of driving around with his friends. In context, this comes off as a criticism of Paul for not spending enough time with his family, and instead hanging around Vin Diesel's rapidly expanding neck all the time.

About fifty percent of Diesel's dialogue is even audible at all, which explains why David Twohy barely had him say a word for the entire first hour of Riddick. Diesel, 47, can barely pull off the climactic fight scene with Statham on the roof of a parking garage, and Statham himself is starting to look a bit slow at the same age.

Things get even worse in Furious 7's finale, however, as after we watch CGI Paul Walker silently play on the beach with a young boy who is not his own, the movie yields to a montage of Walker's scenes from the previous films. All those memorable moments are recalled, like that time he drove a car, and slept with Vin's sister at least twice.

"You're not going to say goodbye?" Michelle Rodriguez asks Vin as the sack of meat strolls off the beach and bracingly lowers himself into yet another vehicle. He tells her that it's never goodbye, implying that he will see Paul again in the afterlife. (There is no way that gasbag is going to heaven if he keeps making these pieces of shit.)

Vin pulls up at a stop sign after that, and who but Paul Walker should pull up alongside him? Yes, they made a street race into the last scene of their movie, played over sappy music about how much they miss their friend. At first I was disgusted and appalled, but then the words "For Paul" were draped over a beautiful white light. Would "Fuck You Paul" have been more appropriate considering the overall tastelessness of this tribute? Sure.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

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Dome Versus Dome

by LAUREN BANS

Fast Five
dir. Justin Lin
130 minutes

Fast and the Furious movies are like animal videos on the Internet, and not only because Paul Walker's face looks like an LOLcat. A few years ago a clip of a single puppy licking its paws was enough to trigger a dopamine rush, but after 100 million hours of sweet-faced animals on YouTube the brain requires more stimulation to incite the same kick.

Now it takes something more ambitious, some novel clafoutis of cute, like a Golden Retriever puppy spooning a handicapped cheetah at a kindergarten choir concert to suffice.

"don't use bing!"It's the same logic behind what dudes who never get laid call the "strange pussy theory," as well as the growing spectacle of the Fast and the Furious franchise. Whereas a couple drag races did the trick in the first installment, Fast Five opens with cars soaring off a moving train, a bunch of roid-raging beefcakes in fisticuffs, a gas tank explosion, and Paul Walker and Vin Diesel doing Olympic 10 dives off a bridge. This is all within the first 15 minutes.

The original cast escapes to Rio de Janeiro for this one, where the plan is to lay low for awhile. But that’s not much of a movie so Vin says, "One more job, and then we're done forever" which is as believable as when I say "One more cookie, and then I'm putting them away for the night." The hit is on Reyes, a corrupt business man who controls the favelas and forces his lady workers to wear bikinis all day while they bind his money, unlike Vin Diesel’s lady workers who just wear bikinis all day of their own volition.

First the fast, furious crew invades one of Reyes' warehouses and burns the money to show their mission is not just about bank, there's some larger, albeit vague moral battle they're waging, despite the fact they cause countless Rio cops to drive into walls and stuff. Then they go after the money. Unfortunately the movie went for a PG-13 rating so there is no real sex to behold, but there is a wrestling match between Vin and The Rock so intimate it is impossible to discern where one bald dome ends and the other begins.

There are some cars in this movie. They don't morph into Autobots, but they do everything else and eye blow you in the process, enough to make you question your donation to Coalition for Alternative Transportation. Director Justin Lin smartly plays Vin Diesel's acting inability for laughs rather than accolades. And there are a few choice slow-mo moments - one where beads of sweat soar from Vin Diesel's cheek as it accepts a punch, the other when The Rock’s inhumanely massive face menaces some wee bad guys with a constipated glare - that are basically just animated gifs made before the Internet could do it.

Combine that with a script in which 90 percent of the lines uttered could be movie poster taglines, along with non-stop metal acrobatics, explosions, and gun play. There's not much to take away from the experience. But there’s nothing to dislike about it either.

Lauren Bans is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. You can find an archive of her work on This Recording here. You can find her website here, and she twitters here. She last wrote in these pages about waxing.

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