Family. (Spoilers)

It’s almost a guarantee that franchises lean into the memes and Furious 7 is where I think the series fully adopted the “family” joke. I can’t count how many times the family comment is brought up in this movie, but that’s only because I can’t count higher than whatever comes after six so it might not be all that much at all. I do know that Dominic and the other characters talk about family a lot though.

Set shortly after the end of whatever the hell the last Fast & Furious movie was titled, Furious 7 is a direct sequel to this as well as finally bridging the gap to Fast & Furious: Tokyo Drift which despite being the third movie was set way in the future. Owen Shaw is in the hospital in a coma and his brother Deckard (Jason Statham) is on the revenge path. Because you never abandon family, even if family abandons you. Deckard is played by Statham so naturally he is an expert military commando guy who can kill a room full of heavily armed and armored badasses with his pinky.

How do you beat the stunts in Furious 6? Simple; you start the film by air-dropping a bunch of cars out of a big military aircraft. It’s kinda crazy to think that this movie was shot on a $190 million budget and they actually still use practical cars that were truly dropped out of a plane. I know I’ve compared Fast & Furious to becoming more like Mission Impossible with every film, but I have to wonder how many of these decisions are because Tom Cruise still does his own stunts like holding on to planes.

But Deckard isn’t really the primary antagonist of the film, as the crew gets sidelined by Mr. Nobody (Kurt Russell) who recruits the team on a dangerous mission. You see the government is tracking down this thing called the God’s Eye, a device capable of hacking into any system and tracking individuals-hey didn’t we just watch this movie but with less cars? On second though, Dead Reckoning also had a lot of cars. They really are two franchises in the same.

Furious 7: Dead Reckoning has the crew infiltrate the party house of a rich guy hanging out in Abu Dhabi and it culminates in Dominic driving a really nice car out of one skyscraper into another. The series is absolutely absurd and it keeps getting crazier with every new release. A few of the characters even stop to make an aside on how absolutely ridiculous this film series has become, talking about the tank from Furious 6 especially.

I’d also like to say that they gave Paul Walker the best sendoff you could hope for. It would be too easy in a series like this for the writers to kill Brian, either by having him sacrifice himself or having him killed in obscurity to set up the characters going on a revenge mission. Instead they let Brian go quietly into that good night, having his character retire happy and healthy with his wife and kids and enjoying life. Who would have thought we’d get a somber, touching monologue from Vin Diesel?

The end of the film is downright touching, and it’s not even a film at that point but a tribute from Vin Diesel to Paul Walker. The cast was obviously very close and you can even see in the scene on the beach toward the end that they are just about holding it together delivering their lines about Paul.

Oh yeah and The Rock breaks his arm cast by flexing his muscles. That was pretty cool.