Furious 7 (2015)
There's a version of Furious 7 that exists purely as a blockbuster, and then there's the version that actually plays out on screen, the one that carries the weight of Paul Walker's death in every quiet moment between the chaos. You can't separate the two, and honestly, you probably shouldn't try. The film knows what it is, and it knows what it has to be, and those are sometimes very different things.
James Wan takes over the director's chair here, and you can feel his instincts for controlled mayhem in how the action is staged. The man knows how to build a sequence. The Abu Dhabi skyscraper car jump, cars launched between two towers at impossible heights, is one of the most audacious set pieces in modern action cinema. I mean that genuinely. It's the kind of thing you rewind not because you missed something but because you can't quite believe they actually did it. Kurt Russell slides in as a new addition to the ensemble, bringing a laconic cool that suits the Bond-adjacent espionage trappings the franchise has now fully committed to, and Jason Statham makes for a suitably menacing presence. The team-on-a-mission structure gives the film a different texture to the earlier entries.
For context, I've followed this series for a long time. I reviewed The Fast and the Furious (2001) back when it was a relatively grounded story about street racing and family, and I covered Fast & Furious (2009), where the franchise started pivoting hard toward something bigger and louder. By this point, seven films in, the series is operating in a completely different register. That's fine. But it does mean the thin plotting, the dialogue that barely rises above quips, and the stakes that feel optional because consequences are so clearly negotiable, all of it is easier to forgive if you've already made peace with what these films are.
Strip the stunts back and what you've got is fairly routine stuff. Exotic locations dressed up as plot. A villain thread that exists mainly to justify the geography. The screenplay isn't trying to surprise you, and it doesn't. There are stretches of this film that are perfectly competent and almost immediately forgettable, the kind of blockbuster wallpaper that fills two hours without leaving much of a mark.
And then the final act arrives, and the film earns something it hasn't always worked hard enough to earn. The farewell to Paul Walker is handled with real restraint and genuine warmth. No cheap melodrama, no overwrought score hammering you over the head. Just a graceful, sincere goodbye to someone who was central to these films from the very beginning. I won't pretend it didn't get to me, because it did. The fact that it works as well as it does, given how loud and weightless much of what precedes it is, says something about how much Walker meant to the franchise and how carefully that moment was constructed.
It's worth noting that this film also feels like the point where the connective tissue of the series starts to loosen. What follows it, the next few entries, operate in an even more fragmented way, and you can trace that shift back here. This is the end of something, even as it sets up more to come.
Two and a half stars. Furious 7 is worth your time for the skyscraper sequence and for that closing scene, full stop. The stuff in between? It'll do. But as a piece of storytelling rather than spectacle, it's running on fumes that the series stopped replenishing some time ago.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 2015 | Watched: 2026-05-24
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Netflix · Amazon Prime Video · Netflix Standard with Ads · Amazon Prime Video with Ads
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Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
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