Action Archives - Page 13 of 49 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Fantastic Fest ’15: Gridlocked

September 29, 20152015, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Fantastic Fest, Fantastic Fest '15, Film Festivals, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Dominic Purcell, Stephen Lang, Trish Stratus, Danny Glover
screenplay by Rob Robol & Allan Ungar
directed by Allan Ungar

by Walter Chaw Danny Glover's been too old for this shit for over thirty years now, making it all the more tragic to find him in Allan Ungar's dipshit remake of The Hard Way that nobody wanted, Gridlocked, which magnifies its crimes by also being the second remake of Assault on Precinct 13 that nobody wanted. A desk jockey checking IDs at the police station, Glover's Sully advises about 45 minutes in that he is, yes, too old for this shit. The only thing missing is a wry saxophone riff when he says it. At least Gridlocked, as it's pissing on the corpse of the literally dozens of better movies it's ripping off, had the decency to let Michael Kamen rest in peace, if nobody else. It's uniquely awful.

The Martian (2015)

September 22, 20152015, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Ridley Scott, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

**/****
starring Matt Damon, Jessica Chastain, Kristin Wiig, Chiwetel Ejiofor
screenplay by Drew Goddard, based on the novel by Andy Weir
directed by Ridley Scott

by Walter Chaw The riposte, and it’s a fair one, is: What would make you happy? And the frustrating response is, “I don’t know.” The problem is this (and in a movie about solving problems, it’s germane to raise one): The Martian, Ridley Scott and Drew Goddard’s faithful adaptation of Andy Weir’s bestseller, is essentially a bwana story in which smart and resourceful black and Chinese people band together to save a white explorer who declares himself both “colonizer” and “pirate” at various points in the movie. It’s a summary of a certain kind of film, too, the space opera that used to be all the rage in the 1950s–a decade actually interested in exploration rather than defunding NASA and rabid anti-intellectualism. The only thing missing is a spacechimp and a space lady with rockets in her brassiere. I confess that I probably wouldn’t have even been thinking much, or perhaps as quickly, about the racial politics of this film had Matt Damon, the bwana in question, not “whitesplained” to a black producer (a female black producer) what diversity means as regards his wish-fulfillment reality series “Project Greenlight”. Or if it weren’t directed by Ridley Scott, whose last film, Exodus: Gods and Kings, required volumes of whitesplaining itself as to why the principals of his Middle Eastern/African tale were white.

TIFF ’15: Mr. Right

September 19, 20152015, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Film Festivals, TIFF

½*/****directed by Paco Cabezas by Bill Chambers Max Landis follows up his American Ultra script with another action comedy about slick killing machines but abandons the Manchurian Candidate backstory in a grotesquely cynical fashion: When Sam Rockwell throws knives at new girlfriend Anna Kendrick to prove she can catch them, his conviction is based on nothing more substantial than her being the star of this particular show. Over and over, Mr. Right acknowledges that it's a cartoon, and not in an enjoyably meta, Duck Amuck sort of way--more in a "you don't care, so why should we?" sort of way.…

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

August 31, 20152015, Action, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Disability, DVD, Sci-Fi, Thriller

***½/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras B+
starring Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult, Hugh Keays-Byrne
written by George Miller, Brendan McCarthy, Nico Lathouris
directed by George Miller

by Walter Chaw The best parts of Mad Max: Fury Road (hereafter Fury Road) are, as it happens, those that are most like Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. The parts about civilization rising from the ruins of an atomic war; the parts about misplaced hope and how unlikely alliances can sometimes speak to the human tendency towards faith and the possibility of eternity. The series was always about the myth of the lone hero, striding into whatever situation and facilitating a return to a prelapsarian (pre-poc-y-clypse?) state before disappearing again. Shane, for instance, where a child’s development–or in the case of Thunderdome, a great many children’s development–has been mythologized as the intervention of a mysterious stranger who appears from nowhere and returns there. Max is a metaphor. For courage, heart, intelligence, the yearning for home; he touches in turn each of The Wizard of Oz‘s quartet of self-actualization while keeping the Wizard behind the curtain. If there’s a specific modern mythology to which this series most obviously hews, it’s the Arthur myth, and in Thunderdome, when asked if he’s the return of the fabled Captain Walker, Max responds that he isn’t. But we know that he is.

American Ultra (2015)

August 23, 20152015, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Jesse Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart, Topher Grace, Connie Britton
written by Max Landis
directed by Nima Nourizadeh

by Walter Chaw A lot of thoughts crossed my mind during the Max Landis-scripted, Nima Nourizadeh-directed American Ultra, most of them having something to do with trying to figure out in which movie I'd seen something before. I also spent some time thinking that if this thing were made in the early-'90s, like it seems like it could have been or at least wants to have been, that it would have starred Drew Barrymore and James LeGros. Because I'm 42 and grew up in an era loving movies that were not very good but were very violent and had the sort of appeal that would make me want a poster for Guncrazy twenty-five years later, I'm still working through whether or not that's a recommendation.

Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (2015)

July 30, 20152015, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Espionage, Theatrical, Thriller, Tom Cruise

***½/****
starring Tom Cruise, Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg, Alec Baldwin
screenplay by Christopher McQuarrie
directed by Christopher McQuarrie

by Walter Chaw At some point, sneakily, wonderfully, Tom Cruise became our Jackie Chan. It happened when the storyline shifted away from his essential ickiness–the Scientology thing, the Katie Holmes thing, and all the attendant nightmare gossip–and onto his fearlessness and absolute willingness to perform his own stunts wherever possible. (I realize of course that said storyline may never shift for some.) There were murmurs when he did the rock-climbing in the second Mission: Impossible flick–the one where he recruited John Woo, who was at the time the best action director on the planet. Those murmurs turned to grudging admiration once it was revealed that Cruise let himself be suspended for real outside the Burj Khalifa in Brad Bird’s superior Ghost Protocol; and now, with Christopher McQuarrie’s fleet, intelligent, immanently professional Rogue Nation, for which Cruise hung from an airplane in flight and held his breath for six minutes, Cruise’s bravado is a big part of the draw.

Southpaw (2015)

July 23, 20152015, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Sports, Theatrical, Thriller

*½/****
starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Forest Whitaker, Naomie Harris, Rachel McAdams
screenplay by Kurt Sutter
directed by Antoine Fuqua

by Walter Chaw TV-writer Kurt Sutter breaks into feature-screenwriting by amalgamating Taxi Driver with Raging Bull in a movie that has the distinction of being not only the second film of 2015 with Fiddy Cent in it for some inexplicable reason, but also the second film that Jake Gyllenhaal shares with a little slow-motion girl on a trampoline. Southpaw has the distinction, too, of being the second picture in a row following Nightcrawler that is absolutely not the equal of Mr. Gyllenhaal’s performance in it. Antoine Fuqua’s latest is a rote, by-the-numbers sports melodrama that ultimately lacks the courage of its convictions, meaning that although it’s shooting for Rocky and Requiem for a Heavyweight, it ends up as Real Steel. It wants to be gritty like the American ’70s, see, but if Disney made ultra-violent boxing movies, this is exactly what they’d be like: dead mother and all. The real wonder of it all is that Fuqua manages to match every one of Sutter’s overused sports clichés with an overused Scorsese homage. That’s the real toe-to-toe slugfest, sports fans.

Ant-Man (2015)

July 17, 20152015, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Corey Stoll, Michael Douglas
screenplay by Edgar Wright & Joe Cornish and Adam McKay & Paul Rudd
directed by Peyton Reed

by Walter Chaw You’ve got to feel for director Peyton Reed, the Tobe Hooper to Edgar Wright’s Steven Spielberg in a film, Ant-Man, that will forever be discussed in terms of lingering evidence of Wright’s contribution following his very public divorce from the production. Reed’s like the guy dating the supermodel: everyone’s looking around him to see the main attraction. Indeed, multiple moments are clearly the product of Wright’s sensibility–the flashbacks, in particular, where characters speak in the exact cadence and rhythm of narrator/sidekick Luis (Michael Peña). There are multiple moments, too, where it could be speculated that the movie would have played a lot looser had Wright been allowed to see his vision through to the end. But what’s there is still a pretty good palate cleanser. It’s silly and aware of that without being snarky about it, only once or twice lowering itself to broad slapstick that, here we go again, I don’t believe Wright would have let pass without some kind of edged stinger. At the end of the day, frankly, any film that references The Incredible Shrinking Man so beautifully deserves its moment on the stage.

The Gunman (2015) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

July 7, 20152015, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, DVD, France, Mystery, Spain, Thriller, UK

*½/**** Image A Sound A
starring Sean Penn, Idris Elba, Ray Winstone, Javier Bardem
screenplay by Don McPherson, Pete Travis, Sean Penn, based on the novel The Prone Gunman by Jean-Patrick Manchette
directed by Pierre Morel

by Bill Chambers Sean Penn seems like the last guy who would walk into his agent’s office and say, “Give me the Liam Neeson™,” because his work doesn’t operate on that kind of cynicism. Even I Am Sam, in which he courts an Oscar by playing mentally-challenged, fits neatly into a career whose primary auteurist concern has been the sanctity and fragility of daughters’ lives (see also: The Crossing Guard, The Pledge, 21 Grams, and Mystic River). So it’s reassuring, sort of, to see him use The Gunman as a pulpit for his humanitarian concerns (presuming I’ve correctly extrapolated the political firebrand’s credited contribution to the screenplay), but there is a disappointing transparency to the character, as if he’s afraid that reinventing himself too much in the Neeson mold will reveal, God forbid, a desire to stay popular in a profession he has threatened to quit numerous times. In The Gunman, one of our most transformative actors–a guy who as recently as 2011 turned himself into the spitting image of The Cure‘s Robert Smith and affected a childlike drawl for the length of a feature–comports himself with a tedious self-seriousness, makes time to surf, and smokes way too much to be a credible action hero. He’s Sean Penn in all but name, and he’s kind of a drag.

Terminator Genisys (2015)

July 1, 20152015, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Schwarzenegger, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jason Clarke, Emilia Clarke, Byung-hun Lee
screenplay by Laeta Kalogridis & Patrick Lussier
directed by Alan Taylor

by Walter Chaw Once you come to terms with the fact that there's no internal logic to it (that it's without external logic is a given), once you've accepted that the only way to enjoy something like Terminator Genisys (hereafter T5) is at a great distance, through multiple irony filters and possibly a coma, T5 is still largely unwatchable. Its screenplay is one of those rare disasters generally reserved for a Syfy Channel Original, and indeed, the whole thing plays like the fourth sequel to Sharknado rather than the fourth sequel to James Cameron's The Terminator, which for some reason it replicates shot-for-shot in a series of 1984-set sequences. The premise, see, is that this time around, a Terminator has been sent for Sarah Connor (Emilia Clarke), mother of future resistance leader John Connor (Jason Clarke) and somewhere-in-time consort of heroic soldier Kyle Reese (Jai-Zzzzzzzzzz). What this means is that when Kyle gets sent back into the Cameron film, Sarah is already a badass, has a pet Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) she calls "Pops," and has an adversary in a liquid T-1000 (Lee Byung-hun). I still don't understand how the T-1000 time travels because the rules in this universe are that nothing metal can go through the stargate without a flesh covering. Something else that doesn't make sense, T5 also has a call-out to Chris Marker's La Jetée.

The Films of Hayao Miyazaki (1979-2001)|Spirited Away (2001) – Blu-ray + DVD

June 25, 2015****/****, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2015, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Family, Fantasy, Japan, Romance, Sci-Fi, War

Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro (Lupin the Third: The Castle of Cagliostro) (1979)
***/****
Buy DVD at Amazon.com|Buy Blu-ray at Amazon.com
Adapted from a Monkey Punch manga that was itself based on Maurice LeBlanc’s popular super-spy Lupin, Hayao Miyazaki’s first feature-length film The Castle of Cagliostro came about as an offshoot of his experiences producing television episodes of a popular Lupin series (1977-1981). As such, the animation and backgrounds are more simplistic, the story is more cartoonish (though the very basic Miyazaki hallmarks of a girl in transition, flight, and gadgetry are already in place) and one-dimensional, and the pace is more relentlessly breakneck than occasionally meditative. Beginning as a heist comedy and continuing as an impenetrable fortress/princess in a tower action adventure film, The Castle of Cagliostro is a light, irreverent slapstick exercise with a healthy share of nifty gadgets and derring-do. Missing is a sense of completion and the deeper examination of themes that one will come to associate with the director’s work, but The Castle of Cagliostro stands on its own merits; despite being shackled somewhat by the artistic and thematic requirements of an in-place franchise, the picture reveals the burgeoning promise of a filmmaker who would become the most important voice of the new anime medium. 100 minutes

Run All Night (2015) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

June 15, 20152015, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, DVD, Mystery, Thriller

Runallnightbd1

*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C+
starring Liam Neeson, Joel Kinnaman, Vincent D’Onofrio, Ed Harris
screenplay by Brad Ingelsby
directed by Jaume Collet-Serra

by Walter Chaw Jaume Collet-Serra’s Run All Night fulfills every requirement of the Liam Neeson subgenre of elder-vengeance while simultaneously completing the Grumpy Old Men trilogy in an unexpected way. It’s a hollow stylistic exercise that mainly exposes how good We Own the Night was, and while some slight comparisons have been to Phil Joanou’s underestimated State of Grace, really the only thing Run All Night resembles is everything else Neeson has decided will be his legacy since the first Taken movie about seven years ago. What’s most painful, I think, is how consistently great Neeson is at doing this one thing over and over again. He makes it hard, in other words, to stop wishing he’d go back to doing something worthy of him.

Jurassic World (2015)

June 11, 20152015, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Vincent D’Onofrio, Ty Simpkins
screenplay by Rick Jaffa & Amanda Silver and Derek Connolly & Colin Trevorrow
directed by Colin Trevorrow

by Walter Chaw Jurassic World is Dada. It is anti-art, anti-sense–wilfully, defiantly, some would say exuberantly, meaningless. In its feckless anarchy, find mute rebellion against narrative convention. You didn’t come for the story, it says, you came for the set-ups and pay-offs. It’s history’s most expensive porno: broad characters in familiar situations and then the fucking and the money shot. There’s a scene in the first third where raptor-wrangler Dirk, or is it Chet? Shane? No, wait…Owen (Chris Pratt), yeah, Owen, tells uptight eventual conquest Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) that his raptors are driven by eating, hunting, and *grunt–fist-push–grunt*, and surely Claire must be motivated by at least…one…of those things. Cue the throbbing bass and dirty guitar. There are also constant call-outs to the first film, old enough now to be held as totem to a generation of people wanting to recapture that initial experience. Jurassic Park was similarly a bad movie with great set-pieces; what time has taught us is that it hardly even matters if these films have human actors in them as long as they don’t waste too much time on them. It’s fantasy gratification, and the fantasy it’s trying to gratify is that you can lose your virginity again.

Mad Max (1979) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

May 31, 20151970s, 2015, Action, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Revenge, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

***½/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras B
starring Mel Gibson, Joanne Samuel, Steve Bisley, Hugh Keays-Byrne
written by James McCausland and George Miller
directed by George Miller

by Walter Chaw George Miller’s films are warnings against dehumanization, against valuing machineries over intuition and emotions. It’s what drives the Holocaust parable at the heart of his masterpiece, Babe: Pig in the City; what made him the perfect match for Twilight Zone: The Movie‘s remake of “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.” Though terms like “visionary” and “auteur” are as overused as they are misused, Miller is both. He’s a rarity in the modern conversation: an aging director who shows no signs of a slackening energy or diminished focus. See also in Miller’s work an unusual sensitivity to physical deformity set up against a righteous offense at spiritual blight. (He began his career as a trauma physician.) His films seek to do no harm, but sometimes you need to cut out some healthy tissue to get at the disease. All of it–the work as a doctor, the scrappiness, the impulsiveness that led to his strapping an airplane jet on a car and hoping no one would die (no one did)–is part of a creation mythology for Miller that’s as fulsome as Herzog’s. Testament to Miller’s enduring influence and outsider status: he’s a sainted figure, for good reason.

American Sniper (2014) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

May 26, 20152014, 2015, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, Clint Eastwood, Drama, DVD, War

***/**** Image B+ Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Bradley Cooper, Sienna Miller, Kyle Gallner, Luke Grimes
screenplay by Jason Hall, based on the book by Chris Kyle
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Angelo Muredda After delivering the first funereal jukebox musical in Jersey Boys just last summer, Clint Eastwood returns to better-fitting material with American Sniper, his most muscular and dramatically charged work in years, for whatever that’s worth. The common thinking about Eastwood these days–at least, outside the critical circle that deems his every tasteful composition and mild camera movement a classical masterstroke–is that his internal compass for choosing projects has been off for a while, making him susceptible to the bad taste of undistinguished screenwriters. What’s interesting about American Sniper, which works from a dicey script by Jason Hall that’s always in danger of becoming either a rote action thriller meted out in shootouts or a rote antiwar melodrama about how veterans never quite make it back home, is how obstinately it resists this narrative. Contrary to the vision of Eastwood as an efficient director prone to gliding on autopilot, American Sniper shows him forging something tough and difficult to grasp out of what might have been on-the-nose material.

Tomorrowland (2015)

May 20, 20152015, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disney, Family, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

***/****
starring George Clooney, Hugh Laurie, Britt Robertson, Raffey Cassidy
screenplay by Damon Lindelof and Brad Bird
directed by Brad Bird

by Walter Chaw Brad Bird’s Tomorrowland is a mess and it knows it. It’s unruly, barely contained, just this side of completely falling apart. There are many and distracting continuity errors, and though it makes a joke of it, it’s clear immediately that the movie doesn’t know how to start, much less end. It has an engaging, irrepressible heroine it strands at the moment she should be doing something (“Am I supposed to be…doing something?” she actually asks), and it has a visit to a memorabilia/collectibles store run by unusual proprietors that is packed to the girders with Brad Bird ephemera of the Iron Giant and Incredibles variety. Tomorrowland has hanging about it, in other words, all the elements of disaster: winky meta references, lack of narrative cohesion, desperation-born mistakes, bad screenwriter/Nick-Riviera-bad script doctor Damon Lindelof as Bird’s co-author…and yet it’s good somehow. Credit Bird, who knows his way around spatial relationships, and credit a simple, plaintive idea that the world can be better if we believe that it can be better. If the sign of a great filmmaker is his ability to make a bad actor seem good, Bird is a frickin’ genius for making something Lindelof worked on not an utter catastrophe. It’s big and simple and corny in a Lone Ranger, Captain America, Silver Age Superman kind of way–the kind of big and simple and corny I can get behind.

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

May 14, 20152015, Action, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disability, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

***½/****
starring Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult, Hugh Keays-Byrne
written by George Miller, Brendan McCarthy, Nico Lathouris
directed by George Miller

Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)

April 29, 20152015, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Scarlett Johansson, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Evans, Samuel L. Jackson
written and directed by Joss Whedon

by Walter Chaw It’s pointless to recap this edition of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s endless cycling through decades of storylines, melodramas, loves and blood feuds, deaths and resurrections–this Möbius strip of punching and quipping and punching and quipping and punching and… It’s an ouroborosian worm devouring itself into eternity, if you let it, and the sanction that a few billion dollars confers suggests it’ll keep devouring itself for a while longer. Still, it’s a cripplingly expensive endeavour, meaning that surprise and individuality are crushed in its logarithmic march towards solvency–and the human collateral caught in its gears is the tragedy that the place we get to see Mark Ruffalo and Scarlett Johansson (the two best, most interesting actors in the United States right now) share an emotionally complex scene is in this vacuous light show-cum-cash register, Avengers: Age of Ultron (hereafter Avengers II). You could say that at least it happened–you could also say that you wish it had happened in a vehicle that actually cared about them, and it wouldn’t be too much to ask.

Escape from New York (1981) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc|Escape from New York [Special Edition – DVD Collector’s Set] – DVD

April 13, 20151980s, 2015, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: John Carpenter, DVD, Sci-Fi, Scream/Shout! Factory

John Carpenter’s Escape from New York
***½/****
DVD – Image B+ Sound A- Extras B+
BD – Image B+ Sound A Extras A
starring Kurt Russell, Lee Van Cleef, Ernest Borgnine, Donald Pleasence
screenplay by John Carpenter & Nick Castle
directed by John Carpenter

The below was written a dozen years ago, definitely in a crunch (I remember being among the first to receive a review copy of that DVD and wanting to scoop other sites) and, consequently, probably in a crabby mood. New reviews of John Carpenter movies, particularly the early ones, tend to read like fetishism as opposed to criticism. Indeed, over the years, Carpenter’s aesthetics have become a shorthand for cool, such that some modern horror filmmakers seem to believe that by co-opting them they’ll gain instant credibility. Still, I think I resisted the pleasures of Escape from New York a little too vehemently–this must be the most negative 3.5-star review I’ve ever written. Yes, that rape scene, or would-be rape scene, is troublesome, but for Snake to intervene would’ve been even more offensive, because it would mean the situation was cynically contrived to give him a moment of glory. Snake’s heroism isn’t pandering, and while his laconic machismo fits a certain Eastwood mold, he finally emerges as more of a countercultural badass who uses his carte blanche audience with the President to ask him the kind of impertinent rhetorical question one wants to say to every bureaucrat valued more than the soldiers doing his bidding: “We did get you out. A lot of people died in the process. I just wondered how you felt about it.” The President’s ineffectual condolences, phrased as boilerplate and expressed with squirm-inducing hesitation as he mentally scans for a lifeline (then and there, Donald Pleasence exonerates his miscasting), justify Snake’s final act in a way that makes me regret ascribing the “moral evasion” of The Thing–say what?–to this picture as well. Carpenter isn’t ducking anything here: Snake sees that this world is rotten from the head down and so he lights the proverbial fuse. God bless him, he’s an asshole. (But not a dick.)

Furious 7 (2015)

April 3, 20152015, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Theatrical, Thriller

Furious Seven
**/****
starring Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Jason Statham, Kurt Russell
screenplay by Chris Morgan
directed by James Wan

by Walter Chaw There’s a death culture surrounding car enthusiasts. Whereas in football if a player dies, their memorabilia tends to go dormant, in NASCAR, the sport’s victims are elevated to sainted martyr: Their bits and pieces become as holy relics, sacrifices to thundering machine gods. Predictably, then, Furious 7 (hereafter F7) will enjoy a lavish critical and popular processional, as freshly-dead Paul Walker (the worst semi-successful American actor, living or deceased) haunts every frame with either his digital ghost or his patented expressionless reaction shots. Finished with a combination of camera trickery, CGI grafts, and Walker’s brothers as ghoulish body-doubles, F7 if nothing else proves that Walker is distractingly lifeless in every scenario, but nobly so in this one.