In the Flesh: Fate of the Furious (Patreon)

I kind of love the lizard-brained simplicity of pitting Dom Toretto (Vin Diesel) against his own family by giving him another, more vulnerable family for the villainous super-hacker Cipher (Charlize Theron) to leverage against him. Diesel makes for a good heavy, backed up by Kristofer Hivju of Game of Thrones fame as Cipher’s bloodthirsty right-hand man, and if the plot is microwaved leftovers from the last two films, at least the spectacle is twice as big and three times as stupid to distract from the essential truth that these movies are treading water. How many times can you drag the team back together for one last job before we all admit we’re just watching an endless stream of Cool Ranch-flavored James Bond movies?

F. Gary Gray is a more or less competent director. He at least eschews the jittery, spasmodic cuts that shredded James Wan’s entry into visual confetti, and if his lighting doesn’t do much to camouflage Fate’s often shoddy CGI, it at least involves some level of consideration for things like colors and compositions. At this point in the franchise it’s a struggle to find new things to say about the automotive hijinks. Fate bears no resemblance to the series’ early installments. Kurt Russell is back to raise the stakes as the goofily named secret agent Mr. Nobody, Roman has gone from an angry, charming smooth-talker to a running joke scaredy-cat, virtually every villain we’ve ever met is back as a happy-go-lucky ally (and they’ve brought their mothers, too), and the militarization of the Toretto family continues apace.

Perhaps the strangest thing about Fate is that beneath its treacly sentimentality — best displayed by the Hard Boiled-aping sequence in which Jason Statham’s Declan Shaw shoots his way off of a jumbo jet with a baby in tow — is a kind of mercenary narrative economy. We’re back to domestic bliss by the ending credits, but Elena (Elsa Pataky) catches one in the head when Dom disobeys Cipher. Rather than use this traumatic event to shape the rest of the film, Gray opts to snip Dom’s ex-lover out of the picture almost completely, the tone flopping ghoulishly from heart-wrenching to whimsical in order to accommodate a replacement domestic bliss between Dom and the returned Lettie (Michelle Rodrieguez). Imagine if Edward Cullen got his head blown off and Jacob and Bella settled down happily to raise his kid, like, the week after. It just feels odd!