Fast and Furious: Special Ops is a big popcorn commercial, and if you don’t have any physical discomfort with bald musclemen, it’s worth the price of admission for two hours of movie service. Both Statham and Stone Johnson play hard to get, and Vanessa Kirby is stunning as a female secret agent.
The film is directed by David Leitch (director of Deadpool 2), written by Chris Morgan, creator of the Fast and Furious story series, and produced by Morgan, Johnson, Statham and Hiram Garcia.
The film is a purely commercial film, and at every turn the filmmakers are seen to be catering to audience preferences. At the end of the day, the basis for the film – the confrontation between Johnson and Statham in 2015’s Fast & Furious 7 and the resulting new story with two supporting characters and a villain – was a pre-existing project, and the public’s acceptance of a violent comedy with bald, strong men beating each other up and foul-mouthed slurs seems to have been genuine. Very high.
And so The Fast and the Furious: Special Ops came into being, which essentially has little to do with the eight Fast and the Furious movies. Although the eight Fast and Furious movies gradually transformed from an underground racing movie into a secret agent blockbuster, and eventually even became like “superhero” movies. In the seventh and eighth installments, Van Deusel and others were unable to fight or fall off cliffs, and Captain America was probably not as cool as they were.
The bald-headed duo’s “Gaiden” is clearly a step in the direction of the “superheroification” of the Fast and Furious series. This is a consequence of the global box office sweep of the series, the super-Britishization of action and spy films, the cosmopolitanization of cinema, the ubiquitous gags, and the fact that everything is entertaining. In scenes that are clearly a matter of life and death, the characters seem to be innately unaware of the tension.
One of the things that makes “Special Ops” particularly like a superhero movie is obviously the set-up of the main characters – the villain is an alter ego, powerful enough to lift cars, are you sure this isn’t the Terminator? The other big point is the bickering, you say my voice is disgusting, I say you look ugly, like a female Hulk.
The movie also features a series of shots of Johnson pulling a helicopter with his bare hands, almost identical to those in Captain America 2; Deadpool’s character Ryan Reynolds is basically a “replica” of Deadpool.
There are too many commercial movies on the market to learn from Marvel, and it’s a pity that “Speed”, a series with its own style, is so devoid of the public. But from the producer’s commercial point of view, this is after all a tried and tested film model, and the box office will certainly not be bad.
On the other hand, since the fifth installment of the Fast and Furious series, the biggest selling point has been the innovation of the big scenes. In the early days, this kind of action innovation was still in the car chase scenes, then it gradually became a building flying car, parachute jumping car, remote-controlled car sea, polar car chase and so on, “Special Ops” is very hard to try to inherit this point-….
There are a lot of crazy action scenes in the movie, with extreme street chases, helicopter tandem cars, and drones fighting big pickup trucks …… all doing arguably above a passing grade, but not much more special than some of the famous scenes in the “Fast and Furious” series.
So the conclusion is that Fast & Furious: Special Ops is a popcorn movie for most people, but there’s not much to wow them, and that’s about it.
Hollywood commercial movies since 2019 seem to be becoming more and more boring – original, new stories and worldviews are less and less, special effects plus comedy in chaotic battles are a must, universes are popping up all over the place, and remakes of classics like The Lion King and Aladdin aren’t much new. The Fast and the Furious: Special Operations is another commodity in such an environment, and a 7 is about right, as the two big men are hilariously hard at work.
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