It occurred to me after I watched this latest of the Fast franchise films that these movies have the Bond license: back when Sean Connery and then Roger Moore made Bond films, these films could be filled with the most ridiculous nonsense and nobody cared. In fact, people celebrated them. You put that crap in another film and people wouldn’t accept it but in a Bond movie and it’s perfectly okay. Such is the case with the Fast franchise and this steaming pile of garbage that everyone else but me enjoys. I feel like I watch different movies then everyone else who likes these films.

It’s hard to catalogue everything that’s wrong with this film but it’s pretty much the same things that are wrong with other entries in the series:

• shallow, boring characters who serve as archetypes and nothing more,
• a by-the-numbers plot that feels stolen from an episode of an adventure TV series from the ’70s or ’80s – think Mission Impossible or The A-Tea
• an insistence that every single stunt in the film must defy physics,
• a rash of continuity errors
• and a subtle obsession with a set of values antithetical to my own (posing as “family”).

This film had the added bonus of stuffing in a bunch of different films into one, so we get a mini Jason Statham film at the climax of this one… just because?

I spent ages ranting to my girlfriend about the various things that made no sense in this film but I understand that you don’t care that it sucks. In fact, you like it because it sucks. Or something like that. For some reason, this franchise has found that sweet spot so that they can make expensive spectacles with no consideration for things that make any kind of sense, and millions of you will pay money (as I did today) to fund more of it. I am mystified.

This movie, like its predecessors (that I’ve seen) had things wrong with it on every level. I’m not sure there’s a single scene in this movie that you could watch in isolation that doesn’t have something wrong with it – be it rampant sexism and misogyny, a plot hole, really clunky dialogue, a stunt that makes no sense, or what have you. And that’s not a good thing.

But I can say one thing that’s positive: these films are at least less boring than your average Marvel comic book film. Those films are more competently made, however, so I’m at a loss as to which I dislike more.

3, because Tyrese made me laugh a little bit, because Kurt Russell doesn’t take himself seriously – unlike just about everyone else in this stupid, stupid movie! – because Jason Statham beat people up with a baby on board, and because I didn’t quite feel the film’s ridiculous 2 hour and 16 minute run time.

Does every single film in this franchise end with a fucking dinner party? Fuck these movies.