Furiouser and Furiouser

The Fate of the Furious (2017) is the eighth entry into this silly car movie franchise. We watched the heck out of it. It may or may not be good. It's another entry in the F&F series and that's that.

It starts out in Cuba, with some street racing - Vin Diesel wins in reverse gear with his engine on fire. I don't think gear ratios work like that. Hell, cars don't work like that. If a car movie franchise doesn't care about how cars work, what can you say?

Diesel meets mystery woman Charlize Theron as master hacker Cipher, who shows him (but not us) a piece of blackmail and gets him to betray his team. Dwayne Johnson is sent out to retrieve a McGuffin in Russia, but first, he has to finish coaching his daughter's soccer game. This is maybe my favorite scene, with the Rock bringing all his intensity to a kid's game. He leads the girls in a magnificent haka - Johnson's Pacific ancestry is perfect for this Maori war-dance. It's both silly and develops Johnson's character.

So, Diesel takes off with the McGuffin, an EMP generator. Funny, we've been seeing this gizmo everywhere, from Arrow to Agents of SHIELD to here. I blame rightwing radio for hyping the threat. Johnson takes the fall for the failed heist and goes to prison, which is fun and the gang busts him out.

Theron needs this as part of a plot to get the next McGuffin, then the next, and so on until she - dare I say it? - rules the world! The final step is a Russian nuclear-armed submarine - didn't we just see that in Agents of SHIELD? Just part of the zeitgeist, I guess. That leads to, you guessed it, cars chasing subs under the ice.

I should mention some of the rest of the team, along with Diesel and the Rock. Michelle Rodriguez never gives up on Diesel, and doesn't have much to do. Ludacris and Tyrese Gibson are around mostly for comic relief. Gal Gadot has gotten too big to be part of this team. And the Shaw Bros., Jason Statham and Luke Evans are brought back by their deliciously cockney mother, Helen Mirren. (Didn't Luke Evans get killed, which is what drew his brother into the series? Oh well.)

This was fun, but it's pretty overstuffed and somewhat familiar. The whole series is getting that way. We still enjoy every entry, but maybe they could stop trying to top themselves every time. Do a small sidequest, like Tokyo Drift.