“Collision avoidance system disabled,” warns one readout. They brush against one another, the herd keeping everybody in line. However, these zombie cars push forward like wild buffalo. If anything, the fleet of cars looks more like a tsunami from a Roland Emmerich film. “It’s zombie time,” goads the mysterious hacker Cipher. At one point, a sea of cars cascades through an urban centre. Gray treats the cars in The Fast and the Furious 8 almost like living animals. A car trips it flips in slow motion then it impacts upon the hard surface. Gray repeatedly and frequently employs slow motion shots between impacts in order to emphasise the physical contact. Early in the movie, the hacker Cipher suggests that Dom lives in the “ten seconds between the start and the finish” of a race, and there is something of that to Gray’s direction. The action scenes in The Fast and the Furious 8 have an endearing roughness to them, a fascination with what happens when heavy objects hit one another while moving at high speeds. In Gray’s action scenes, his muscle cars seem to be locked in mortal and visceral combat, squeezing and pressing and hammering against one another. Gray is more interested in impact and collision than style and grace. However, Gray brings his own sensibility to the movie’s set pieces. His work is not as graceful as his two predecessors, his action scenes not as fluid. Gary Gray, who admittedly lacks some the finer action movie sensibilities as Lin or Wan. The Fast and the Furious 8 is directed by F. James Wan had a strong sense of pacing in his action scenes, holding cuts just long enough. Justin Lin had an uncanny awareness of space, clearing and crisply conveying where things were and in what direction they were moving at a given moment. “It’s who’s behind the wheel.” The series has been surprisingly lucky when it comes to directors, with each bringing their own style to bear on the film. “It ain’t what’s under the hood that counts,” Dom reflects early in the film. To be fair, the dynamic evolution of The Fast and the Furious is perhaps down to shifts behind the scenes. The series could do a lot worse than to anchor itself in a new buddy dynamic between Jason Statham and Dwayne Johnson. Indeed, the most valuable player in The Fast and Furious 8 turns out to be Jason Statham. Some of these changes involve personnel, with the tragic passing of Paul Walker sidelining one of the original characters while plot developments in The Fast and the Furious 8 serve to push Vin Diesel to the periphery of the narrative. Some of these changes are tonal, the series swapping the earnestness of the earlier films for more self-aware patter. After all, this is a franchise that began as a weird low-rent thriller about street racers in Los Angeles, but which as built to confrontations involving electromagnetic pulses and nuclear footballs. The series has arguably kept the body mostly intact, but has taken every opportunity to swap out various elements underneath the hood. One of the more interesting aspects of the Fast and Furious franchise has been watching the series effectively redesign itself over its run. There are points at which the whole thing threatens to fall apart like that surface ice, but the film moves just quick enough to stay above water. In the meantime, The Fast and the Furious 8 settles for a neon orange Lamborghini being chased over ice by a nuclear submarine. Fast Five revived the franchise by removing the throttle and setting in motion a sense of escalation that threatens to send the characters into space before the conclusion of the series. Like a driver wrestling with a powerhouse engine, the series works best when it actively turns into the spin. “High noon, but with cars…” is far from the most audacious scene in The Fast and the Furious 8, but it might be the most indicative. The franchise runs on sheer main-lined ridiculousness, on the blurry line that falls somewhere between awesome and absurd. A wry observer might suggest that the series is Diesel-powered, but that is not entirely true. In many ways, it has become Universal’s own home-grown superhero franchise, albeit one that swaps out the capes for cars. There is an endearing charm to The Fast and the Furious as a blockbuster movie franchise.
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