Fast and Furious 8: The Fate of the Furious, the latest chapter in Universal box office throttling franchise, expert in lunacy, destruction and unbridled joy. In other words, It lives to up Fast and Furious legacy.
NOTE: Before reading the article you must know that this article does indeed contain Spoilers so read at your own risk!
Director F. Gary Gray has the keys this time around, and gives the franchise a gut punch of a twist: Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) has turned on his team and, under the command of the nuclear winter blonde villain known as Cipher (Charlize Theron), threatens to destroy the Furious family and everything we love about them.
Here are the eleven best reasons why Fast and Furious 8 : The Fate of Furious is best:
1.The Perfect Duo – Fast and Furious 8
One of the fundamental tenets of the Fast & Furious franchise is a love-hate bromance. Dom and Brian (Paul Walker) had that dynamic in the first few movies. In the last movie, Hobbs, Dom, and Brian all shared one. With this installment, Dom is removed from the equation, leaving Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson’s Hobbs to deal with Jason Statham’s Deckard Shaw.
The two share the best chemistry in the movie (better than the chemistry between Dom and Michelle Rodriguez’s Letty), and it’s a weird pleasure to behold.
2.A Great Villain
Charlize Theron plays the dangerous hacker known as Cipher. In The Fate of the Furious, she’s rocking crazy braids and looks like she belongs in an X-Men movie. She even has one gasp-inducing nefarious moment where she makes out with Dom in front of Letty, signaling that she’s truly turned Dom and that she’s going to mess with him and his family.
Because Cipher is a hacker, she’s often playing a mastermind role. She calls the shots from her base, while all the action erupts a world away. A lot of her scenes involve Theron looking at a screen and screaming for someone to give her a better image of the action, or twiddling her fingers and delivering gooey lines like, “It’s zombie time.”. This is Personally one of my favorite things about Fast and Furious 8
3. Funniest bits in the script
The Fate of the Furious introduces us to Eric Reisner (Scott Eastwood), a protégé to the well-funded, well-armed, wisecracking Mr. Nobody (Kurt Russell). Reisner is a textbook goody two-shoes, and he’s the de facto butt of every joke that Roman (Tyrese Gibson) makes. And Roman himself is the butt of every barb coming from Tej (Ludacris).
The Reisner-Roman-Tej comedic food chain really works, as the three actors understand the relationship their characters have with one another. Roman is always trying to show up Reisner, only to get knocked down a peg (or two) when Tej comes into the picture. Even in a bright orange Lamborghini, Roman is seen as the weakest link — something Gibson really revels in.
4.Action Sequences Feels Different
By now, Furious faithful know that the crown jewel of The Fast and Furious 8: Fate of the Furious is a gigantic submarine breaching the surface during a chase scene on a frozen bay. The marketing of the movie has been geared toward that spectacular moment.
But what you’ll notice about Gray’s directing style as opposed to that of his predecessors (James Wan directed Fast and Furious 7, and Justin Lin directed Fast and Furious 6) is that Gray puts a bigger emphasis on the weight and power of the vehicles during the action scenes. Gray’s sequences focus on the impact of crashes, rather than the sleek agility of the cars, making for a more physical movie overall.
5. The Rock Bicep-curls A Concrete Bench
The unspoken truth of the Fast & Furious franchise is that it’s really an undercover superhero film. The Fast and Furious 8: Fate of the Furious tosses away its civilian alter ego, goes full superhero, and leans into the absolute ridiculousness of its characters.
The result: an absolutely insane and completely entertaining scene where Hobbs pulls a concrete bench out of a wall and then proceeds to bicep-curl it.
6. 240 MPH
If you’re driving at 240 mph, you should win a race, but that wouldn’t be any good for the drama of the opening race. Also at 240mph a rust-bucket car would fall apart. Also at 240 mph, if you jumped from said vehicle while it’s on fire, you would break every bone in your body.
It happens again in the Berlin-set action set-piece after Dom has taken out Hobbs and drives back to the bank at necessary speed to keep up with the plane, and then stops in a screeching halt. Physics be damned.
7.Berlin…..The Meeting Place
When Hobbs is hired by the secret agent guy, he says he’ll need a good team, prompting Hobbs to get in touch with Dom by phone to tell him about the job.
We hear the entirety of their conversation – as we see Dom answering and hanging up the phone – and it amounts to Hobbs telling him that they have something clandestine to do in Berlin. He doesn’t say when, he doesn’t even specify where in Berlin, they just sign off with the ridiculous “see you in Berlin” and somehow all end up in the right place at the right time. Now that is what makes Fast and furious 8 the best!
8.The ATM Camera
During the sequence that sees Dom dupe Cipher to go and visit Mrs Shaw, she struggles to find a way to make sure he’s actually under the hood of his car and not up to some sort of shenanigans.
At first, she uses the camera in an ATM across the road – some distance across the road in fact – but luckily, Dom knows she’s hacked it and gets Raldo to drive his van in the way. How the hell did he know that? And how to did he know where to park his car exactly to be just out of the other camera’s view? It’s beyond conceited. Again; Fast and furious 8 at it’s best!
9.Zombie Car
Sometimes action sequences are so stunningly choreographed and so delightfully impactful that they leave your jaw hanging on the floor.
None do this better in Fast and furious 8 : Fate Of The Furious than the ridiculous, brilliant zombie car sequence, in which Cipher’s team of nameless geeks hijack around 1000 cars with auto-drive technology (a massively inflated, silly number, but it works for the set-piece) and gets them to chase the Russian minister’s limo to destroy the motorcade and trap him, so Dom can retrieve his nuclear codes.
10.Owen Shaw
Despite definitely being killed in Fast & Furious 6, because there’s no way he could have survived being thrown out of the back of a plane, Owen Shaw was revealed to be alive – barely – in Furious 7, but in such a poor state that his brother Deckard really isn’t happy.
It’s something of a revelation, then, that in Fate… Owen is fresh out of his coma and in a black sight prison somewhere Deckard can’t actually reach him. Later, still, he reappears, with a new scar on one side of his face (and the new nickname of “Scar-face” courtesy of his darling brother).
11.Helen Mirren
As great as it is to have Helen Mirren playing a character in this franchise – and honestly, the idea of her being the matriarch of a sprawling British crime family is just glorious – her performance leaves a lot to be desired.
She has apparently been watching Eastenders for inspiration – not only for the characterisation of her villain, who is pure Peggy Mitchell – but also for her mockney accent, which feels somewhere between Van Dyke and nails down a blackboard.
Conclusion – Fast and furious 8:
Gray has a keen understanding of the Furious world. The fast and furious 8: Fate of the Furious is more self-aware than its predecessors, and belligerently absurd in the best way possible. But even though it has a really fun, twisty concept and a great villain, it doesn’t always know how to handle all these moving parts.
The Fast and furious 8 : Fate of Furious is in theaters and all of you hurry to watch this exciting and mesmerizing movie of the year.