The Fate Of The Furious will be released in theaters on Friday, April 14th.March 10th.

Can you believe this is the 8th installment of The Fast and The Furious movie franchise? I can’t believe the first one, The Fast and The Furious came out way back in June 2001, right before the start of my Senior year of High School, watching that one is definitely a fun throwback to early 2000’s nostalgia.

Here are my initial thoughts on the movie, were at the point now that Fast and Furious movies have a running checklist of what us fans should expect in their movies and this one accomplishes all of them.

The movie takes it to the next level as far as stakes go (as seen in the trailer, Vin Diesel’s character Dominic Toretto turns his back against his team and they have to stop him), a car race, over the top stunts, reminded you everything the team does is for family and fun banter between cast members.

Going into this movie my main question is can the franchise move on without Paul Walker, who unfortunately passed away in 2013. While I enjoyed this movie, I didn’t feel it was as good as the previous movies, specifically sequels 4, 5, 6 and 7 (since those movies came after Tokyo Drift and created/focus on this established team). The movie did it’s best to move on from Paul Walker’s character and change the focus to The Rock’s character along with Vin Diesel’s chacracter.

Here are some things that had my head scratching:

What I find funny about the evolution of this franchise is that Vin Diesel’s character, Dominic Toretto, when you go back to the very first movie, he was originally a grease monkey that had a shop and would street race on the side and would do the occasional job stealing stuff from big trucks but has now grown into an international spy who takes down all of these big crime bosses in different countries. At the same time is appears there isn’t anything he can’t do, he knows tech, he’s a great hand to hand combat fighter, he’s the perfect guy with no flaws (remember in Fast 5 when he fought The Rock and beat him). Dominic Toretto always finds a way to win.

In this movie we see Dominic deal with a big moral problem but yet finds a way to win. i understand he’s the hero, but there needs to be a limit. When you watch Fast and Furious movies you always need to separate disbelief because they appeal of this franchise is that they push the envelope on what they can do in cars, planes, etc.

As I mentioned earlier when it comes to a checklist of what we want to see in a Fast and Furious movie, one of the biggest items are action scene involving cars that are very unlikely to happen in real life, but i digress this is Hollywood after all and you can say for most action movies.

Since the focus of these movies are the over the top stunts that in the real world no one can really accomplish, don’t expect this movie to win you over with deep story telling, it’s all about the cars and races and chase scenes, hopefully they can invest in better story telling in future movies and/or spin off movie.

What I did enjoy about the movie was that the first scene opens up with a car race, finally going back to their roots, which is something they have gotten away from in the more recent sequels. The various settings that this movie takes place in are gorgeous and really make the action scenes more fun to watch,

i love how the main characters have unbreakable bonds between family and friends, which plays into one of the few emotional satisfying qualities of this movie. If you want dumb fun it believers that with over the top explosions, but what separates this franchise from other movies with a lot of explosions is that fact we care about these characters, we know these characters and are attached to them, so when they are caught up in a big action scene, we emotionally get caught up how these scenes play out and if they are going to survive. It’s a fun summer block buster style movie, great popcorn movie with a few surprises.

I enjoyed and laughed at the chemistry/scenes between The Rock and Jason Statham’s characters and would love to watch a spin-off movie between the two of them. Also, it looks like Scott Eastwood’s character is filling the void that Paul Walker left behind. Eastwood did a solid job and I’m curious to see how his character will grow within the franchise.

As I mentioned before, overall I liked the movie and had fun with it, especially during the emotional third act.

Originally I gave the movie a 7 out of 10, but after sleeping on it, I’ll give it a 6.5 out of 10.

Listen to my audio review of The Fate Of The Furious.

Check out the first trailer below.

Check out the second trailer below.

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