Fast & Furious 7

(M) ★★★

Director: James Wan.

Cast: Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Jason Statham, Dwayne Johnson, Michelle Rodriguez, Jordana Brewster, Tyrese Gibson, Chris Bridges, Kurt Russell, Nathalie Emmanuel.

"But there's only six of us....?"

DESPITE what Vin Diesel thinks, Fast & Furious 7 is not going to win next year's Oscar for best film.

The fact that Diesel said such a thing in an interview is indicative of what this film means to him and his fellow cast and crew.

For them, this is more than just another instalment in the astoundingly popular series that began in 2001 as a movie based on an article about illegal street racing and somehow morphed into a high-octane heist-action franchise. This is their eulogy, farewell, and tribute to late co-star Paul Walker, who played the likeable hero Brian O'Conner in all-bar-one of the films and who died in a car crash mid-way through production of F&F7.

Walker's passing certainly haunts the movie. There will be a slightly morbid fascination for many, intrigued by how the franchise deals with his death. There is also the subconscious game of "Spot The Stand-In/CG Face" that you can't help but play from time to time.

All of this weighs heavily on the film, which stirs up the emotions a couple of times when Paul Walker's reality seeps into the Brian O'Conner's reality.

But no, sorry Mr Diesel, F&F7 is not going to win the best film Oscar.

However if there was an Academy Award for the film with the most preposterous, impossible, implausible, illogical and insane moments in it, then F&F7 would totally be in the running.

This time Toretto (Diesel) and his team are being hunted by Deckard Shaw (Statham, whose presence was teased at the end of F&F6), who is seeking revenge for what happened to his brother Owen (Luke Evans) in the previous film.

Meanwhile a shadowy government agent known as Mr Nobody (a scene-stealing Russell) offers Toretto and co the means to take out Shaw if they retrieve a kidnapped hacker (Emmanuel) from a group of terrorists.

The series has slowly evolved from its surprisingly humble beginnings into something equivalent to a nitrous-fuelled, roided-up motorised (read: American) version of the Bond franchise, with its exotic locales, insane villains, hot girls, covert operations, insane action sequences, and cool cars.

All of that is on show and, in typical franchise fashion, F&F7 attempts to up-the-ante on the previous films' stunts, such as the bank vault drag from #5 and the longest runway in the world in #6.

So here we get the utterly bonkers parachute drop seen in the trailer and a CG-heavy sequence involving a trio of Abu Dhabi skyscrapers, both of which have to be seen to be believed (or rather disbelieved because they defy physics, logic and reason).

This level of insanity is not an issue - this is what you sign up for when you purchase a ticket to a Fast & Furious movie.

What is an issue is the on-going soap opera elements - the amnesia, the various secrets - that just feel clunky and awkward as the script struggles to find anything close to character development amid the car crashes and explosions. There's also a near-death recovery in here that ranks as one of the dumbest ever committed to film, and the old "it's all about family" theme which has been a part of the last four films gets wheeled out again (although ironically the good guys are fighting a bad guy who is after revenge for what happened to his family).

But it's hard to write-off F&F7 because it does what it says on the box - big, dumb car-based action, although this time it's infused with some genuine heart as it pays its respects to Walker.

Be warned though. "Over-the-top" doesn't cut it as a descriptor for these movies any more - there needs to be an adjective for whatever is above "over-the-top", because that's what F&F7 is.