Colette Arrand

Tag: Vin Diesel

  • Movie Review: Furious 7 (2015)

    Movie Review: Furious 7 (2015)

    Furious 7
    Let’s start here: Furious 7 is the latest in a growing list of action movies that I found myself simultaneously awed and troubled by. While I am continuously surprised that a franchise as pleasurable as this one frequently is came from the same film that spawned listless spinoffs like Torque and Biker Boyz, the seventh installment of The Fast and the Furious‘s now thankfully untangled universe spends a not insignificant amount of time arguing that, in the right hands, global surveillance is a good thing. You’ve seen this before—Batman, needing to find the Joker, convinces his tech guy, with little more than a shrug, to let him jack into every phone in Gotham City. Superman flies up, up, and away so that he can listen very carefully for the heartbeat of the one specific person in Metropolis he’s looking for. Professor X builds a machine that can let him listen to the thoughts of hundreds of thousands of human beings at once so he can identify the mutants in the crowd, show up on their doorstep, and give them a hug. The Avengers spent half a movie trying to fix a flying boat that was being used to spy on the world and only got upset about it later. Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) is a superhero, too, perhaps the 21st century’s first original one, and here, in 2015, when a government agent named Mr. Nobody (Kurt Russell) tells him that there’s a flash drive that’ll let him or whoever has it tap into every Internet-ready device on the planet, he is completely unfazed. Hell, that kind of thing might even be useful.

    Furious 7 means nothing by its MacGuffin, of course. Mr. Nobody promises that it can be used to track down Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham), a shadow who has been hunting Toretto and his makeshift family for crippling his brother in Fast & Furious 6, but Shaw is never exactly hiding, unless that’s what he’s doing by showing up on a mountain pass with a specially rigged car designed to force Toretto and his crew off the edge of a cliff. Dom’s proposed alternate plan of hanging out and drinking Corona until Shaw found him probably would have worked, truth be told. But as all the fancy computers in the world bleep and bloop until they’re locked on to the face and voice of a computer hacker who is trying to bring this spy system down with a prayer and a digital readout screen, one can’t help but wonder how important these big, dumb, exciting action spectacles will be in normalizing the already near-constant state of surveillance we live under.

    Director James Wan, taking over for Justin Lin, is taken by quick-edited establishing shots of Furious 7‘s many foreign cities and rapid-fire montages of female anatomy just, you know, standing around during the series’ now perfunctory drag racing and beachfront sequences, a somewhat goofy throwback to the series as it was before Lin made it a canvas for spectacle. That nostalgia serves both narrative and extra-narrative purposes, though, as the film is at least nominally about the creation and evolution of a makeshift family, and is absolutely about giving deceased star Paul Walker a final bow. As Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) struggles with her memory and her place in the crew, Furious 7 wrings the most tension out of the action sequences revolving around Walker’s Brian O’Conner, a new father who would be struggling with his adjustment to the domestic life if Deckard Shaw’s revenge plot didn’t involve cutting every branch of the Toretto family tree. The Fast and the Furious has struggled in the past to make Walker and Jordana Brewster’s domestic quibbles seem relevant to the business of whipping around exotic cities in cars capable of lightspeed, but if Furious 7 isn’t focused on these characters (and Brewster has been relegated to pregnancy and staying back at the fort for some time now), then it is at least dedicated to giving them a real ending, a thing not often afforded to the main character of a decade-spanning action franchise.

    The attention paid to the core characters from The Fast and the Furious means that there is less for the ancillary characters to do, Tej (Ludacris) and Roman (Tyrese Gibson) getting their tech guy/comic relief licks in from the fringes of the film so that Kurt Russell can wax sarcastic about the shadowy government organization he works for. Dwayne Johnson, whose character completely changed the scope and tenor of the series, spends most of this installment hospitalized. When he’s in play, though, he’s in play: flexing, waggling his eyebrows, spouting catchphrases—Hobbs is Dwayne Johnson in “The Rock” mode, pure brain candy. With each film he appears in, it’s clear that Johnson is on another level as an action star, bringing together physical presence and charisma in a way that suggests peak Schwarzenegger or Stallone, if either of those men were capable of having fun with themselves as living action figures. He and Diesel are compelling foils to each other and to the Schwarzenegger/Stallone rivalry, Johnson’s best vehicles being those where he is all mega-watt charm and Diesel’s being those where he can brood and menace. Diesel is forever the philosopher-king of the quarter-mile, and it’d be easy for a movie with Furious 7‘s purpose to get lost, gazing into its own navel. If Furious 7 is the last film in the series that suggests a family barbecue and a return to normalcy is ever going to be possible for these characters, Toretto is going to need his buddy Hobbs around to remind him that there’s a whole world out there to simultaneously save and destroy, one car at a time.

     

    Furious 7. With Vin Diesel (Dominic Toretto), Paul Walker (Brian O’Conner), Jason Statham (Deckard Shaw), Michelle Rodriguez (Letty), Jordana Brewster (Mia), Tyrese Gibson (Roman), Ludacris (Taj), Dwayne Johnson (Hobbs), Kurt Russell (Mr. Nobody), Nathalie Emmanuel (Ramsey), Tony Jaa (Kiet), Djimon Hounsou (Jakande), and Ronda Rousey (Kara). Directed by James Wan, from a screenplay by Chris Morgan.

  • Movie Review: Riddick (2013)

    Movie Review: Riddick (2013)

    Riddick

    Though I’d certainly like to, there’s no denying the pleasure of a movie like Riddick—a meat-and-potatoes sci-fi brawler that’s light on the kind of moral hand-wringing weighing down its contemporaries. After a summer of apocalyptic confrontations and destroyed worlds, Riddick‘s uncomplicated plot—a simple, man vs. monster narrative—is something of a breath of fresh air. There are problems—significant problems—as the film attempts to zoom out from its protagonist’s quest to survive a desolate, hostile planet, but if writer/director David Twohy and Vin Diesel’s stalled saga becomes the franchise the two have always envisioned, there’s just enough here to suggest Richard Riddick’s journey home as worthwhile of a few summers as the adventures of, say, Thor or Superman.

    Largely without dialogue beyond a gruff Diesel voiceover, the first third of Riddick functions as one of the more compelling features of an otherwise dull summer. A king at the conclusion of The Chronicles of Riddick, Diesel’s titular one man army finds himself exiled on a planet that was barely discovered before its human occupants decided abandonment a better course of action. Beyond air and water, everything Riddick encounters is hostile. Dog-like creatures hunt him in packs, and worse creatures lurk in the shadows and muck, standing between the man and his sustenance. It’s an odd path for an action movie to take, but in its spare, brutal shorthand, Riddick lets the audience know that this is a film about the unequivicated power of masculinity.

    Because the movie can’t be 90-minutes of Vin Diesel talking to a CGI dog, Riddick finds a mercenary outpost and pulls an emergency beacon. This hails two squads to descend upon the planet. One, a rag-tag bunch of ill-equipped thugs (led by Jordy Molla and seconded by Dave Bautista), is there merely to collect Riddick’s head in a box. The other is an incredibly professional, well-appointed outfit. Their leader, Boss Johns (Matthew Nable), doesn’t care much for the price on Riddick’s head—he wants to find out what happened to his son, last seen in Pitch Black. His lieutenant, Dahl (Katee Sackhoff), is the group’s muscle. But, as is the theme of all Riddick movies, women aren’t taken seriously even when their machismo outpaces that of the men in the room. The leader of the two-bit mercenaries, head-box in hand, tells Dahl that he’s going to have sex with her. “I don’t fuck guys,” she snarls, busting the guy’s lip open with one solid shot.

    This line serves two important purposes, neither of which have to do with Dahl defending herself from multiple attempted rapes. As a scuttling horde of beasts trap both mercenary teams and Riddick in the same room, it’s clear that for all his “head in a box!” bravado, Molla’s Santana character is a secondary threat at best, a villain to be laughed at and discarded when things get tense. And, as Sackhoff’s character is the one who so effectively neuters Santana, her declarative sets the character up as both a Strong Female Character in the pejorative sense—a real cool lady with guns and breasts!—and a sexual challenge for Riddick. Chained up and awaiting execution, Riddick laughs and tells the room the exact plot of the third act, including that he’s “going to go balls deep” in Dahl, but only after she asks because Riddick, killer or not, is at least willing to wait for consent.

    As an unabashed fan of 1980s action movies, I’m willing to forgive a lot of Riddick‘s flaws in the name of bloody, mindless fun. Over a dozen men chase Riddick to the gates of hell for a piece of the bounty, yet none of them are developed much beyond the fact that they’re all bad asses, with Dahl’s woman warrior and some punk kid’s nervous preacher thrown in for variety, I guess. I didn’t expect nuance from the film, but I also didn’t expect it to have an understanding of sexuality cribbed from a sexually frustrated session of Dungeons & Dragons. Beyond her saying that she doesn’t fuck guys, there’s nothing in the film suggesting that Dahl wouldn’t. But in an action movie you tend to take people by their words, their wardrobe, and the size of their gun. She’s got the biggest of the bunch, and there’s no evidence from the others in her crew that she’s lying when she says, to a room full of dudes, that she doesn’t fuck guys. “I’m gonna go balls deep” is something a teenager says before rolling to score with a rescued princess, not the password required to flip a woman’s switch from gay to straight. There is no switch, and it’s strange to see a movie in 2013—the third installment in a series that’s featured progressive depictions of women before—wheel out this old, depressing trope in the name of adding one more notch to its alpha’s belt.

    Almost as soon as Dahl is called out for and reassigned to her gender, she is put in the spaceship with the nervous kid and told to chill out while the men kill the aliens and recover the lost power cells necessary for everybody to escape. She does, and she fucks Riddick because he survives the night without being eaten alive. And though this is an R-rated film, replete with gore and cursing and breasts, Riddick can’t even do its characters a solid and show them enjoying or even engaging in sex. “Tell Dahl to keep it warm for me,” Riddick says, keeping it macho to the end. It’s a bitter coda to an otherwise uncomplicated, accomplished riff on monsters and mayhem. There’s potential here, especially if Sackhoff returns to a future installment and is given more to do than sit around waiting. But if Riddick is proof of anything, it’s that few things in a film are as frustrating as unrealized potential.

    Riddick. With Vin Diesel (Riddick), Jordi Molla (Santana), Matthew Nable (Boss Johns), Katee Sackhoff (Dahl), and Dave Bautista (Diaz). Directed by David Twohy and produced by Diesel, Ted Field, and Samantha Vincent. Screenplay by Twohy, based on characters created by Jim Wheat and Ken Wheat.