Slow and Sedate

Another lazy (not to mention hot and sunny) Bank Holiday spent, mainly, on the sofa, watching a film.  This time it was Fast and Furious 8.  It's the sort of mindless thing that just washes over you while it is on, with no pretentions other than to serve up several spectacular car chases and lots of explosions.  There's a part of me which feels that I really should have gone out and done something in order to enjoy the good weather on this Bank Holiday.  But I didn't feel too guilty, as I'm off work anyway, so wasn't one of those precious bonus days off that Bank Holidays present, plus, being the last day of a three day weekend, you can guarantee that the roads would be clogged with people trying to get home from their breaks.  It was bad enough last night when, despite deliberately delaying my departure from my mother's, I found myself caught up with hordes of idiots driving back from the Dorset Steam Fair - none of them seemed to have a clue where they were going.  But to get back to the point, Fast and Furious 8 was an entertaining enough way to spend a Bank Holiday afternoon.  It's certainly not the best of the series - I preferred 6, which was set largely in London and 7, where Jason Statham was the main antagonist - with the the CGI often seeming too obvious and undercutting the realism of the stunts in many key sequences.  Also, the plot was much weaker (OK, I know that nobody watches these films for the plot, but this time around it was notably less complicated), ontop of that, Statham's 'face turn' deprived Vin Diesel and 'The Rock' of a truly worthy opponent.

Regardless of all that, I have a soft spot for the Fast and Furious series, particularly the later entries where any pretence of producing gritty crime dramas centred around cars was abandoned in favour of glossy globe-trotting pseudo-espionage adventures with ever more lunatic plots.  Perhaps my affection for the films lies in the fact that, in the most recent entries, at least, they have focused on some of the least likely performers to have made it as top action stars.  I mean, where else can you see a trio of bald headed middle aged men crashing cars, blowing things up and knocking seven bells out of each other?  It gives me hope that perhaps my days of driving US muscle cars arent over yet.  While number eight might not have been the best of the series, it clearly proved popular at the box office, as we've already had a spin off (Hobbs and Shaw) featuring two of the aforementioned slap heads in their own film, while number nine has recently been shooting a few miles up the road from me.  I must admit that I admire the way in which the series has constantly evolved, which is probably why it has reached a ninth instalment.  Not only has the premise of the films shifted in order to encompass ever wider ranging action, but the main cast has also shifted from film to film, with some major characters departing and new ones arriving.  It means that the series has, so far, avoided the pitfall of many such franchises, of each film feeling too much like a reprise of the previous one: there's just enough variety in plot elements, set pieces, locations and characters to make each one just different enough to distinguish itself from its predecessors.  But enough of this talk of mainstream blockbusters.  Tomorrow I'm back to my holidays with, hopefully, another trip to the coast.