The Fate of the Furious

Released: April 2017

Director: F. Gary Grey

Rated PG-13

Run Time: 133 Minutes

Distributor: Universal Pictures

Genre: Action

Cast:
Vin Diesel: Dom
Jason Statham: Deckard
Dwayne Johnson: Hobbs
Michelle Rodriguez: Letty
Tyrese Gibson: Roman
Chris ‘Ludacris’ Bridges: Tej
Charlize Theron: Cipher
Kurt Russell: Mr. Nobody
Scott Eastwood: Little Nobody
Nathalie Emmanuel: Ramsey
Luke Evans: Owen

You know, for everything that I say about sequels and re-makes, I still go and see them holding out hope that they’ll be at least half-way decent.  I’ve seen the good, bad, and the horrendous when it comes to sequels.  I’ve said it before and I will continue to say it again and again:  A sequel has to do more than just deliver more of the same.  Not only do you have to give people what they HAVE seen, but you have to add more to it.  You have to spruce it up by exploring the world a little bit more.  The Transformers movies don’t add anything new to the formula.  The last several movies in that franchise have been indistinguishable from one another.  I gave The Last Knight a 7/10, but the fact is, I don’t think I need to see anymore movies in that series until they actually try and deliver a compelling film.  Sequels have a hard enough time trying to do more than the original film, but Michael Bay just doesn’t seem to understand that bigger and louder isn’t always better.  Transformers stopped being remotely decent with the first movie.  That’s not to say that these big and loud sequels are all bad.  They’re not.  Michael Bay just has a one-track mind.  The Fast and the Furious franchise is one of those franchises that I really like, because they know what they are and they run with it.

The Fate of the Furious picks up a short time after the events of Furious 7.  Dom and Letty are on their honeymoon in Cuba, when Dom is approached by a mysterious blond-haired woman.  Shortly after, Dom and his crew are called upon by Hobbs to help locate and retrieve an EMP weapon.  During the escape, Dom deliberately causes Hobbs to crash and steals the weapon.  After being sent to prison, Hobbs, along with Dom’s crew, is recruited by Mr. Nobody.  It seems that Dom is in league with Cipher, the blond-haired woman who happens to be a cyber-terrorist.  Not understanding why Dom would turn on them, Mr. Nobody also recruits Deckard Shaw, the villain from the previous film, to help.  The overall story has never really been the focus of the Fast and Furious movies.  They are just simply a way of getting from one action set-piece to another.  Sometimes a good movie doesn’t necessarily need a good story to tell, but for that to work, the characters and action have to step up their game.

Thankfully, the characters of the Furious movies are what really propel the story and action forward.  These characters are actually quite interesting and the actors portraying them are fantastic.  Everybody here steps up their game.  Scott Eastwood is a newcomer to the franchise, and he’s surprisingly not bad.  If the name sounds familiar, it’s because he’s the son of the legendary Clint Eastwood.  Tyrese Gibson is in fine form here as is Ludacris and Kurt Russell.  These guys are awesome.  Vin Diesel gets to flex his acting muscles a bit more in this film.  I’m not going to spoil the story part of why he turns against his team, but it is an important part of the film.  The guys that steal the show, however, are Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham as Hobbs and Deckard Shaw respectively.  Everyone here has some kind of chemistry with one another and Jason and Dwayne really hit it off.  They’re fun to watch.  Statham is clearly having fun with his role.  Helen Mirren makes a bit of a cameo appearance as the mother of Deckard and Owen Shaw.  Pretty cool.  The short end of the stick, though, is Charlize Theron as Cipher.  Theron is a fantastic actress, but her performance is way too much like Vickers from Prometheus.  She feels deliberately too much like a Bond villain.  She doesn’t quite have the same menace that Deckard and Owen had.  She brings the movie down a bit for me.

One of the things that has truly been very interesting over the past few Furious films, are the locations.  We’ve seen these films take us to locations like South America, Europe and the Middle-East.  One of the coolest aspects about Fate is that part of the film was really shot on location in Cuba.  We get to see an exciting car race take place in Havana.  We don’t see a lot of films shot in this little country and it’s a shame.  It’s beautiful.  The architecture, the cars, and the people really give the opening scenes a fantastic Latin flair.  From there, the film takes us to New York and Iceland.  This is quite literally a globe-trotting franchise.  They go everywhere, and the amount of action that these countries allow Vin Diesel and company is very surprising.  These are beautiful locations, and places that I would hope to visit one day.

If there’s one thing that most people can say about The Fast and the Furious movies, is that these films know how to escalate things.  At first, I didn’t think the movies could get any crazier than Fast 5 or 6.  Furious 7 took it up a notch or two beyond what I thought was bat-shit crazy.  Ladies and gentleman, I present to you, The Fate of the Furious, the most bat-shit crazy action movie I’ve seen this year.  It takes the action that we’ve seen in the previous films and dials it up to 20.  The action in New York city was absolutely bonkers when Cipher literally takes control of over a thousand cars and causes all sorts of havoc, especially when she causes cars to fall out of buildings several stories up.  That was INSANE!  Well, that was nothing compared to the stuff that happens in Iceland.  O. M. G.  They really went all out on the action here.  The craziest thing is, is that a lot of the action and stunts were done in camera.  So what you see, is generally what you get.  Yeah, there’s definitely CGI involved for sure, but a lot of what happens on the ground is done for real.  The submarine itself, though, not as much, but that’s understandable.  It’s absolutely crazy.

A lot of people have claimed that the Fast and Furious movies are no different than the Transformers movies.  Bullshit.  What separates the two franchises, giant robots notwithstanding, is that the film-makers of the Furious movies actually have made characters that we actually give a shit about.  What has Michael Bay given us?  A lot of action, but no character.  Honestly, I cared more about what happens to Vin Diesel’s character than Mark Wahlburg’s, because we’ve had seven movies to get invested.  Bay has no such pretense.  He doesn’t actually give two shits about character development.  While the Furious movies are really silly and come across as somewhat melodramatic at times, at least they attempt to make us care.  Michael Bay stopped caring about his characters YEARS ago.  That’s one of the reasons why I find myself not caring that much about Transformers these days.  Yeah, Fast and Furious aren’t the smartest movies, but they’re not trying to be.  They’ve embraced their insanity and the actors and director know it.  That is actually far more compelling than anything that Michael Bay has given us in well over a decade.  Sorry, folks, there is no comparison between Fast and Furious and Transformers.  I like both, but when it comes to big-budget blockbusters, my money is on Fast and Furious.

My Recommendation:  Definitely worth seeing.  9/10.

 

What’s Next? Terminator 6

I’ve mentioned on several occasions about how much I love the first two Terminator movies.  I will go to my grave loving those films.  James Cameron burst on to the scene with the original movie that blew everyone away.  Arnold Schwarzenegger became a household name and Cameron would go on to direct Aliens, another amazing sequel.  If there’s a director who knows how to craft a proper sequel,  it’s James Cameron.  I recently reviewed Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and that is absolutely one of the finest sequels ever made.  I would put it up there with Empire Strikes Back and Aliens.  It’s that good.  The ending of the second film was both ambiguous enough for a potential third film and solid enough that you didn’t need one.  After Titanic hit theaters in 1997, James Cameron had the rights to Terminator sold from under him.  The rights eventually ended up at Warner Bros. who would start development on a sequel:  Rise of the Machines.  Starring Nick Stahl as John Connor, and Kristanna Lokken as the new T-X Terminator, Terminator 3 would also see the return of Arnold Schwarzenegger.  This would be the last film that Arnold would star in before he became governor of California.  The film was released to theaters in 2003 and the reception was mixed but somewhat positive.  It wasn’t a bad action movie.  Jonathon Mostow knows how to craft a solid action movie.  The problem with T3 was that it was a blatant re-hash of the previous film.  It introduced a couple of new ideas like the fact that Judgment Day was going to happen anyway and an ending that was ballsy as hell.  I have to give credit to Terminator 3 for that ending.  It was definitely one of the highlights of the film.  Unfortunately, the film began to rely more and more on CGI, and it was clear that it didn’t have the same feel as the previous films.  Enter Terminator: Salvation, the first film that doesn’t feature Arnold Schwarzenegger as a main character.  Starring Christian Bale as John Connor, Terminator: Salvation takes place in 2018, years after the bombs fell.  Credit must be given to McG for trying something different here, but T4 ended up being a generic post-Apocalyptic film that happened to have Terminators.  Visually, it was interesting and Sam Worthington’s character was fairly compelling, but the execution of the film left much to be desired.  I didn’t hate the film.  It was pretty decent for what it was.

Now, we come to Terminator: Genisys.  After Terminator: Salvation’s lackluster performance, AND the fact that the franchise would again change hands, it was decided by Paramount Pictures that rebooting the franchise would be a good idea.  It needed to happen.  Sadly, Terminator: Genisys suffered from multiple problems which would end up with the franchise’s future hanging in the balance.  The film’s marketing was awful.  The second trailer for Genisys gave away a major plot point in the film, which could have been an awesome game-changer.  That was also a problem that plagued the previous film.  You don’t want to show too much in a trailer.  You want to show enough to get people curious.  The other problem is that the film wasn’t properly written or executed.  The casting was….interesting.  I don’t have anything against Jai Courtney, whatsoever.  I actually happen to like him.  I just don’t think he was the right guy to play Kyle Reese.  See, the story would cause havoc with the timeline from the original film, so things would go haywire.  The idea of multiple timelines in a Terminator film isn’t really a bad idea.  Again, the execution was poor.  The visual effects were great and the action was wonderful, but the story was so bogged down by so many ideas and theories that it got lost.  The way the film ended was just….what?

The rights to Terminator will revert back to James Cameron in 2019.  That’s a year and a half away.  Arnold Schwarzenegger and James Cameron have both gone on the record that they would like to see a final Terminator film that would tie everything up.  Despite Genisys’s performance, it looks like we’ll be getting one more movie.  Apparently, they are getting Tim Miller to direct, while Arnold Schwarzenegger will return.  Emilia Clarke is not coming back and apparently, neither is Jai Courtney.  As for what needs to happen, I genuinely don’t know.  I feel that the Terminator movies NEVER should have gotten this far.  I’m one of those people that feel that Terminator should have ended with the second film.  I don’t hate the follow-up films, but they just pale in comparison.  With James Cameron producing, Terminator 6 needs to find a way to finish the story that was introduced in Genisys while providing a satisfying conclusion to the entire series.  This is my third “What’s Next?” post, but I’m having a hard time coming with ideas for what needs to happen with Terminator and things that I want see from the final movie.  I think what I would want to see is the character played by Matt Smith, who played Skynet as a T-5000 Terminator.  How did he end up in the original timeline.  Who sent the Terminator back in time to protect Sarah Connor?  These are questions that need to be answered, but I don’t know how they’re going to do that.  While I would love to see one more movie, I think we’ve all seen what the Terminator franchise has to offer at this point.  They’re just beating a dead horse.  Maybe it’s just time to let it go.

What’s Next? Transformers 6

A little while back, I posted a review on the latest entry into Michael Bay’s Transformers movies: The Last Knight.  I didn’t hate the movie entirely, but it was an absolutely insane shit-show.  If I graded the film based on action alone, I would have given the film a solid 10/10.  The action was phenomenal.  It’s just that the movie surrounding the action wasn’t so hot.  The acting, while mostly passable, failed to connect with the audience and the story was just made absolutely no sense whatsoever.  So…what’s coming up for the franchise?  Paramount has announced a while back that they are planning at least 13 more movies in the Transformers universe, but considering how poorly received The Last Knight was, they may want to rethink that.  We are getting a spin-off which is supposed to be due next year.  It’s going to be about Bumblebee and is supposed to be set in the 80s.  Apparently, they want to give him an actual voice and the design from the animated show.  I’m very curious.  Is it going to be any good?  Hard to say.  Michael Bay is only going to produce the movie, not direct it.  Bumblebee is an interesting enough Transformer to warrant his own movie, so I’m willing to see how that goes.  As for a sequel to The Last Knight?  That’s a little difficult to answer.

Based on the current numbers on Box Office Mojo, Transformers 5 has pulled in well over 400 million dollars world-wide.  The film bombed in the States, pulling in barely over 100 million dollars on a 217 million dollar budget.  If it wasn’t for the international market, The Last Knight would be a complete disaster for Paramount studios.  It’s not even performing as well as Age of Extinction.  Not even close.  What needs to happen for Transformers 6 to be better than the previous effort, is to jettison Michael Bay entirely.  He’s a great action director.  He knows how to frame it and shoot it.  The issue is that he can’t seem to hire proper writers to be able to tell a coherent story or even give us compelling characters.  Not only that, the humor almost always falls flat.  If you took out all the humor and most of the exposition, you would end up with a 2 hour movie.  That’s all we really needed.  Now, we know that Unicron is going to make himself known at some point in the next movie or two.  There’s no getting around it, since they mentioned him multiple times.  How that’s going to happen, I don’t know.  Apparently the big guy is hiding underneath our planet, and the Transformers’ creator, Quintessa, wants to destroy him to give life back to Cybertron.  What the next movie needs to happen is to focus entirely on the Transformers themselves and their potential battle with Unicron.  If you want a good starting off point, check out the original animated Transformers film from 1986.  That film introduced Unicron and made him feel like a legitimate threat.  This is Unicron, for those who don’t know:

What I want to see from Transformers 6, is Michael Bay completely removed from the picture entirely.  I don’t even want him producing the picture.  We also need to hire writers that have at least SOME respect for the source material.  The people that wrote the last 4 movies have done a major disservice to not only the source material, but also the fans as well.  I’m sorry, the only movie that didn’t flat out suck in any way was the first film.  Also, we need to get rid of the human characters.  Nobody goes to a Transformers movie for human drama.  We want to go these movies to see giant shape-shifting robots wreck shit.  So far, the only movie that has managed to deliver on ALL counts is the original animated film, and that’s over 30 years old.  Michael Bay doesn’t even seem to care anymore, as all he sees is dollar signs.  Well, the performance of The Last Knight should tell Paramount Pictures that some adjustments need to be made.  I know that Paramount wants a cinematic universe with Transformers, as that seems to be the “in” thing these days, but if they fuck up Unicron and that particularly story-line, a lot of people, including myself, will stop going to these movies.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day

Released: July 1991

Director: James Cameron

Rated R

Run Time: 137 Minutes(Theatrical Release), 154 Minutes(Special Edition)

Distributor: Tri-Star Pictures/Artisan Entertainment/Lionsgate Studios

Genre: Science Fiction/Action

Cast:
Arnold Schwarzenegger: The Terminator
Linda Hamilton: Sarah Conner
Robert Patrick: T-1000
Edward Furlong: John Conner
Earl Boen: Dr. Silberman
Joe Morton: Miles Dyson
S. Epatha Merkerson: Tarissa Dyson

You might be wondering:  Why is Major Tom reviewing Terminator 2?  Several reasons.  One:  It’s literally been 26 years since the original release of the film, so writing a review on the film makes sense.  Two: James Cameron is going to be re-releasing the film to certain theaters next month in 3-D.  Three:  Because I feel like it.  In 1984, a young up-and-comer of a director named James Cameron unleashed a science fiction film onto unsuspecting audiences:  The Terminator.  Featuring an iconic performance by also up-and-coming actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, The Terminator etched its way into the minds of film-goers world-wide.  A story featuring a time-traveling murderous cyborg was very unique.  Written and Directed by James Cameron, The Terminator became an instant classic, combining elements of science fiction, action and horror into one movie.  The film launched the careers of both James Cameron, who would go on to direct Aliens as his next movie, which would also become revered, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, who became one of the biggest action stars of the 80’s and 90’s.  The film changed what expectations would be for certain forms of science fiction.  That’s nothing to say of the visual effects which were state-of-the-art at the time and for a very small budget.  It’s widely regarded as one of the best science fiction films of all time.  26 years ago today, James Cameron managed to do the impossible:  He created a sequel that not only surpassed the original film in terms of visual effects, but also crafted one of the greatest sequels ever.

Considering how everybody and their mother has seen both The Terminator and the sequel, I don’t feel that it’s necessary to go over the film’s story.  Don’t get me wrong, the story for Terminator 2 isn’t awful.  It’s great.  It’s just that considering how well-received this film was/is, I would rather go over the elements that made this film so damned good.  The story is obviously a continuation of the adventure we saw in the original film, but taking place a decade later.  The story for T2 feels like a very natural extension of what we saw before.  We see young John Connor as a rebellious youth while his mother is incarcerated in a mental facility.  Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character shows up to protect the child from the film’s new villain, the T-1000, played by Robert Patrick.  Because of a much larger budget, the story and characters are given time to grow and evolve.  Even Schwarzenegger’s character evolves.  The story makes sense and is paced well enough to keep things going, but it also allows time for the audience to connect with the characters.

Speaking of characters, they feel like real people caught up in very unusual circumstances.  John Conner is an understandably troubled, but intelligent young kid with no respect for authority.  Of all the people who played John Connor over the years, Edward Furlong is easily the best.  Because he was a kid at the time of filming, he infused the character with his own levels of rebellion and attitude.  Young John Connor behaves like a real kid.  Sarah Connor is no longer the meek and weak young woman that we saw in the first film.  Here, she’s a battle-hardened warrior-mother that generally knows how to take care of herself.  Linda Hamilton really upped her game for this one and underwent weeks and weeks of training to sell the character as she’s become.  Even the side-characters are fleshed out to a certain degree.  Miles Dyson, who is the creator of the chip that would eventually lead to the creation of Skynet, isn’t doing it for world domination, but to try to make the world a better place.  When he’s told that his work would be responsible for the deaths of 3 billion people, you can see the distress.  Joe Morton really infuses the character with a bit of naive humanity that makes the character someone you would want to survive.  The Terminator himself evolves over the course of the film, and this has more to do with the extended version of the film, which is the version I’m reviewing.  In the extended version of the film, we see John and Sarah open up the T-800’s skull to try and reset the switch that would help the Terminator learn more about people.  There’s a lot of interesting character interactions throughout the film that are surprisingly relevant.  John’s relationship to his mother is probably the most organic that I’ve seen in years.  We see these two estranged characters drift apart and finally come back together as family by the end of the film, and that’s one of the movie’s key themes: Family.  It’s fleshed out in a way that’s not cheesy or over-the-top.

James Cameron has always been known for trying to push film technology to the limit, and as some of his more recent films have proven, tend to take a long time to make.  Cameron really first dabbled with CGI in a movie called The Abyss, in which a water tentacle, piloted by aliens, would imitate the likeness of some of the characters.  This was an early attempt at “morphing.”  This was eventually perfected in Terminator 2, and was featured with a villain called the T-1000, a liquid metal assassin that could assume the form of anybody that it killed.  For a movie that’s 26 years old, the visual effects and CGI still hold up very, very well.  Watching the T-1000 shape-shift is a thing to behold.  Don’t believe me?  Check it out:

Terminator 2: Judgment Day won an Oscar for Best Visual Effects, if that’s any indication.  It’s not just the CGI that’s incredible, but also the make-up effects, miniatures and the actual designs of the T-800 Terminators that you see at the beginning of the film.  The visual effects team at Industrial Light and Magic need to be commended for how seamless their effects blended with the rest of the film.

Since this IS an action movie, let’s talk about the action:  Holy. Shit.  Terminator 2 features some of the craziest and incredible action sequences that I’ve ever seen.  When you ask people what their favorite action scene in T2 is, they tend to not pick out just one.  Honestly, the opening future sequence is brilliant.  It’s bleak, it’s explosive and it’s bleak.  The first car chase is between the T-1000 in a semi and John Connor and small motorcycle through a massive canal.  No CGI here, ladies and gentlemen.  The stunts they did, they did for real.  Granted, there is some obvious use of wires, but that’s to be expected in a film this old.  Every action sequence escalates.  The assault at Cyberdyne is one of the most iconic sieges I’ve ever seen in a movie.  Watching Arnold Schwarzenegger handle that mini-gun is awe-inspiring.  The explosions are big and the gun fights are second-to-none.

The music by Brad Fiedel is definitely another one of the film’s strongest elements.  It’s definitely has that electronic vibe, but also feels orchestral at times.  But throughout the film, the music weaves an emotional fabric over the whole experience.  The main theme is one of the most iconic music themes in cinema.  The music also helps punctuate the relationships between the characters, and makes for a very emotionally gratifying experience, especially during the ending.

Speaking of endings, everybody knows all about the sequels that came after T2, but quite frankly, the story was properly wrapped up in the second film.  The follow-up movies were nothing more than cash-grabs.  They attempted to try and cash in on the popularity of the first two movies without understanding why these movies existed and why they are so damned good.  Terminator 2: Judgment Day is not only one of the best sequels ever made, it is one of the best movies EVER.  I remember seeing it in a local drive-in theater back in 1991, and I was totally blown away by it.  There is a very strong message throughout the film that’s not just about the importance of family, but in how not to let technology destroy our humanity.  It’s a good message, but I feel that only Sarah Connor could really sum up the message in this film:

Final Recommendation:  Must Own.  Perfect 10/10.