‘Furious 7’: SXSW Review

Any moviegoer who didn’t know about the untimely death of Paul Walker would never guess it had occurred during production of ‘Furious 7,’ a film that (whatever massive efforts were required to work around his absence) is as stupendously stupid and stupidly diverting as it could have hoped to be had everything gone as planned.The […]

Any moviegoer who didn’t know about the untimely death of Paul Walker would never guess it had occurred during production of ‘Furious 7,’ a film that (whatever massive efforts were required to work around his absence) is as stupendously stupid and stupidly diverting as it could have hoped to be had everything gone as planned.
The knowledge of his death in a November 2013 car accident colours our experience of this unintentional swan song in many ways, of course, but viewers trying to spot the scenes in which stand-ins and CGI played Walker’s part for him will find it hard enough that they may do the right thing: Stop trying, and instead go along with a reworked screenplay that ushers him off the stage with as much grace as any other development in this muscle-car melodrama.
Technical miracles aside, the nature of the story makes watching ‘Furious 7’ something of a morbid game: Over and over, the action puts Walker’s Brian O’Conner in such jeopardy that we think, “Ah, this will be the scene where they give him a heroic death.” But saying “over and over” acknowledges that Brian survives, at least, the bomb blast that nearly kills his family in one fell swoop, that he manages to get out of that big bus hanging precariously over a cliff, and that he, and for that matter all his pals, drive their cars out of a plane in midair and parachute to the ground without so much as denting a fender. But producer Neal H. Moritz, who introduced the super-last-minute screening at South by Southwest, begged the audience to keep mum about Brian’s fate, so we won’t provide an exhaustive list of the many certain-death situations he faces and survives.
hollywoodreporter.com