F&F7 starts and ends with Jason Statham and yet he’s the villain here, Deckard Shaw, an assassin who turns out to be the older brother of Owen Shaw (Luke Evans), the villain in F&F6 who was routed by Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and his friends. Jason vows to take revenge on all of them and he first kills Han (Sung Kang) in Tokyo then nearly maims Hobbs (The Rock.) He also blows up Dominic’s house and nearly killed his sister (Jordana Brewster), her husband (the late Paul Walker) and their son.
A mysterious agent known as Mr. Nobody (Kurt Russell) offers Dom the use of an unprecedented tracking device to find Jason. But first, his team has to to rescue the device's designer Ramsey (Nathalie Emmanuel) from a terrorist (Djimon Hounsou).
The unabated action galore in F&F7 is something you won’t take seriously as it nearly demolishes Los Angeles. There’s something cartoonish about it, like the sequence where cars come out of an airplane and lands using parachutes on a mountain road and miraculously hit their targets without getting any demage at all. If you’re fond of loud explosions, car crashes and tall buildings that collapse without anyone being injured, then you’ll enjoy this.
It has no pretensions that it’s made to engage our minds as it’s actually mindless entertainment. As usual, we see the comic interplay among the characters like the tech whiz Ludacris and the talkative Tyrese Gibson. The story has really strayed too far from its daredevil car-racing roots.What we really enjoyed in this movie is its tribute to the late Paul Walker who perished in a real life car accident. Scenes from his past F&F movies we’re shown in a touching send off that suggests he is riding into the sunset. He passes while still filming the movie and we read that his two brothers served as stands in to finish all his remaining scenes.
In the romance department, Dom finally succeeds in getting back the memory of Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) who has acquired amnesia in the last F&F flick. She is shown engaging in a mean one-on-one catfight with MMA champ Rhonda Roussey that rivals the bone crunching maschismo-filled mano-a-mano between Jason and Vin.
