FURIOUS 7 (2015) – My rating: 6.5/10

I’m disappointed to say, the last movie with Paul Walker was not a good one.  Furious 7 was so digitized and robotic, I almost dozed on it.  Far too many car chases and far too many crashes.  The team must have done billions, not millions, but billions of dollars worth of damage to the cities they frequented.  The destruction of buildings were worst than Ironman 3 and Transformers.  These crash/chase and demolition scenes went on endlessly.  The story line wasn’t much better.  The real kicker [YOU MAY CONSIDER THIS A SPOILER] was when Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) was in the hospital, laid up with severe injuries, including a broken arm, which was cast from shoulder to wrist, decided he had to leave.  His cast arm was bent 45 degrees, so to remove the cast, he simply straightened out his arm and the cast exploded off.  Even the audience laughed.  There wasn’t any semblance of reality in the whole movie.  Owen Shaw’s brother, Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham) is killing members of the team, one by one, for revenge after the team killed Owen in Furious 6.  Also a Somalian terrorist called Jakarde (Djimon Hounsou), and a corrupt government official called “Mr. NoBody”  (Kurt Russell) are both competing to steal a computer terrorism program called God’s Eye, that can turn any technological device into a weapon. Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and the team must reconvene in order to stop Deckard and retrieve the God’s Eye program while caught in a power struggle between terrorist and the United States government.

On the bright side, Hollywood tried to give Paul Walker a farewell at the end, which was descent but also digitized, which sort of spoiled it for me.  I understand digital when the body is absent, but even the fight scenes were digitized.  Some of the movements were so fast, you barely caught what had just happened.   I understand Paul’s real life brothers stood in for some of the scenes and Paul himself had filmed almost half of the movie before he died.  Even though Brick Mansions was not Paul’s last movie, it paid more tribute to him as an actor than Furious 7.  I was very disappointed in the film and saddened that we lost such a fine actor but I’m trying to keep it real.  Overall, it you’re a fan, I still say see it on the big screen since it’s being shown in 3D as well as regular format.  The younger you are, the more likely you are to tolerate the over-the-top crashes and demolition of buildings.  I’m just saying!