I sauntered to the Cineworld cinema at Rochester last night and I should have left home earlier as parking is really busy on a Friday night. You circle the car park waiting to see people walking away from the cinema to their car and then you hope to get to the lane where they are parked before another circling car does. It’s like vultures and carrion. It doesn’t really help the there are plenty of people who can’t park and leave gaps way in excess of necessary.
I went to see F8, or Fast and Furious 8, or The Fate Of The Furious. I expected it to be shit. I rated it on IMDB but I had to refer back to this communication to look up what this score should be. I tweeted this opinion too:
I rated Fast & Furious 8 (2017) 2/10 #IMDb https://t.co/S978AKHxcK
— Ian Parish (@iparish) April 28, 2017
I think this film was utter shit. I physically left the cinema before thirty minutes was up. Emotionally I think I’m still in there, I can’t believe how shit this was. I was mentally prepared for a slickly filmed, well written piece of crap which would have garnered a reasonable review but this was . . . . . not that film.
I have watched the first and possibly second second film in this franchise. I can’t remember. I do know that while the first film was not a good film it was watchable and a good piece of entertainment. F8 was a far cry from watchable. Maybe I’m a film snob? Bollocks to that, I am a film snob. I do expect films to at least put some effort into the script and characters. Maybe I shouldn’t have gone to see this particular film? But I am able to like these films and see them for what they are. Why this one made me leave the showing I don’t know.
I have now walked out of two films at the cinema and considered walking out of only one other. Van Helsing was so bad I thought about leaving but I didn’t want to disturb the other guy sitting in the row of seats. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe was the other film I actually left. I wasn’t enjoying it but hadn’t considered leaving it until my guest asked me if I was enjoying it. “No” I replied. “Shall we leave?” came the response. This was a startling revelation, I had never really considered leaving before. We left.
F8 started out with a red car driving along what looked like the Florida Keys and then we were in Cuba. I don’t know if there’s a road like that in Cuba but there definitely isn’t a land link between the Keys and Cuba. Oh well, I can chill out. Havana looked lovely, even if it was in fraternity house party mode. I doubt it’s like that really. We start with a car race along a “Cuban Mile”. Whether that is like a Cornish mile I don’t know. It did seem to be quite a distance. Apparently you can take any old piece of shit car and race it against the best on the island, break it, set it on fire, perform a J turn and reverse FASTER than a fast car going forward and win a race. Just before you are going to launch into the sea you jump out of the broken car and roll along the floor with no injuries. Fuck you movie.
I did like the CGI waves that crashed into the sea wall as the cars came on to the promenade. But it must have been a freak wave because there were no more large waves crashing and in all the other shots the sea was rather calm. Maybe the intended audience isn’t expected to notice these things. Am I too snobby about movies? Up until now I hadn’t thought about leaving. Even Vin Diesel’s dumbstruck stupid acting face didn’t make me want to leave.
The following dialogue made me want to puke, it went a little something like this:
“Hey, you really won the race in that heap of shit car. You must be awesome.”
V.D. wry smile [no actual face movement]
“You can have the keys to my car and my respect.”
V.D. “I don’t want your car, your respect is enough.”
INSERT RED ALERT WARNING SOUND
Who wrote this shit? It’s utter machismo bullshit. This film should have been named “Bullshit cars and bullshit stereotypical hard men who are real men, none of that namby-pamby emotional stuff that was made for girls”. Maybe I have anger issues?
Now, I’m not sure what happened next but at some point there was an association football match between two girl teams and one of them was managed by The Rock. God, this film was lazy. The Rock’s team performed a version of the Haka before playing their match and the other team looked on as though they had never seen this or known about it. Now, if a team has rituals you would KNOW about it. You would be prepared and you would have measures in place to counter the rituals. One of the girls in pink [because hard teams are in red with a dragon and soft pussy girly teams play in pink] says “I don’t want to play anymore”. Did they employ a ten year old to write this script. Screw you movie!
We need to steal an EMP from some place in Germany. Quick, call a group of people who can drive really fast! This movie was so lazy they didn’t even want to attempt a heist sequence. We join the knobs as they are running away having already stolen the EMP. Oh and for information EMP stands for Electro-Magnetic Pulse. You have to add bomb or weapon to the end of EMP for it to make sense in terms of the movie. Also, obviously if you design an EMP weapon it can be lifted by a single person and has EMP written in massive font over its surface.
All of the chasing police are wiped out by a demolition ball swinging from what must be the world’s tallest infinite crane in the world as the bottom arc was perfectly parallel to the road. Perhaps this movie wasn’t for me. Perhaps I need to chill. I am writing this about twelve hours after starting to watch this movie and it is STILL annoying me intensely. I need to get out and have a run.
Somewhere in the thirty minutes I watched there was a car that ACCELERATED from 200mph to enter the back of an aeroplane while it was flying along a run way with the rear ramp down. Note to the producers and script writer. Some cargo planes could fly along a runway at 120 knots with a headwind. Also, how do cars somehow enter a run way on an airport in modern Germany? I thought we had tightened up things like fucking airport fences since all the bad people in the world keep trying to put bombs on planes.
All I needed now was a final trigger to make me walk out of this movie. I even had to disturb two people in my row. I actually considered their viewing pleasure but I reached a point where I couldn’t cope with the shit any more.
The Rock ends up in a bizzarre prison in a cell opposite cockney hard man Jason Statham. So, there followed a load of bullshit “I’m harder than you” dialogue and, surprise surprise, all the locks in the prison suddenly fail and all the prisoners break out and start fighting. I got up, gathered my coat and left. Best decision that day.
I am sad I didn’t see the submarine chasing cars over sea ice, but I’ll stream just that bit another time. This film was terrible. I’m trying to go meta and work out why I reacted so badly to it. The length of this communication worries me. Is something wrong? Normally I can end these reviews in a few paragraphs. “Fucking bullshit” would have worked for this film but it annoyed me. The utter laziness of the script and the machismo crap that reinforces all the stereotypes that modern liberal society is trying to remove. This is a film for reassuring the masses that it’s ok to be an arsehole. It’s ok to be a twat. It’s ok to fight. Pink is a girly colour only for pussies and muscles win over.
I hold out hope that towards the end of this movie the style changed and it reflected upon itself and had a different message. The world should be ashamed of this shit.