THE latter Fast & Furious films offer a viewing experience akin to watching a big-screen feed of a frenetically paced hi-tech computer game to which recognisable Hollywood names and the odd rapper have lent their digital likenesses.
Each time it's loaded up, these celebrity avatars – the latest edition including Kurt Russell, Jason Statham, Charlize Theron and Helen Mirren – get busy thrashing an eye-popping variety of outrageous automobiles around various exotic locations, wreaking ear-busting autogeddon with the occasional pit-stop for an outbreak of explosive gun fighting and/or hand-to-hand combat.
More explicitly 'dramatic' moments play like in-game cut scenes, existing only to barely link each section of tyre-screeching mayhem together and laced with macho/juvenile one-liners and oodles of expositionary dialogue.
Game difficulty is set at a comfortingly unchallenging level where trivial notions like inertia, gravity and mortality do not apply.
Drivers can effortlessly execute jumps across rivers, through walls and between skyscrapers, negotiating hairpin bends at a brisk 300mph – and, if things get too fast and/or furious, they can simply bail out without incurring so much as road rash.
In the rip-roaring opening sequence of Fast & Furious 8, Vin Diesel's character Dominic Toretto leaps from the speeding fireball of his soon-to-explode vehicle after a frantic drag race through the streets of Havana, sustaining only a little light staining to his sleeveless white linen ensemble in the process.
No-one really dies in these films: Michelle Rodriguez's Letty was blown-up in part four but returned to the fray for part six, while original Fast & Furious star Paul Walker was digitally resurrected for additional scenes after being killed mid-way through filming part seven.
In a nice nod to fans and the franchise faithful, Walker's character is respectfully namechecked twice in the new film.
Loyalties are also switched at the drop of a greasy bandana throughout the series: in part six, we saw The Rock's improbably muscled law enforcer Luke Hobbs join forces with Toretto's car-crazed criminal gang to take down the dastardly Shaw brothers, Deckhard (Statham) and Owen (Luke Evans).
F8 sees Deckhard pull a moralistic handbrake turn to take up with his former nemesis Hobbs and Toretto's team – Letty (Rodriguez), Roman (Tyrese Gibson), Tej (Chris 'Ludacris' Bridges) and Ramsey (Nathalie Emmanuel) – under the direction of chipper government spook Mr Nobody (Russell).
They're trying to take down nasty cybercriminal Cipher (Charlize Theron) who has coerced Toretto into helping her steal some tactical weapons, including the all-seeing surveillance tool God's Eye (or "The Devil's Bumhole" as Mirren's character memorably mis-describes it) and a nuclear submarine.
Part of the challenge in sustaining this franchise must be coming up with novel new motorised set-pieces: in F8, director F Gary Gray and co outdo themselves by filming – 'rendering' is probably a better term, given the heavy reliance on CGI – cinema's first ever car chase involving a marauding, whale-like submarine tearing up a frozen lake as speeding vehicles skittter about on top of it.
There's also cool sequence (marred only by worryingly shonky CGI) in which Toretto's gang must chase their errant leader through New York city while negotiating a swarm of malevolent remotely controlled vehicles, including cars launching themselves lemming-like from the upper floors of multi-storey carparks.
"Make it rain," intones Theron as the carnage commences, in what is probably her rather forgettable villain's most memorable on-screen moment.
As ever, Diesel's 'smell the fart' brand of acting is the absolute pits: at least The Rock has the sense to look like he's enjoying just how bewilderingly braindead the entire F&F enterprise has become.
But, of all the main players, it's taciturn cinematic hardman Jason Statham who emerges from the flames of Fast & Furious 8 with his baldy head held highest. He gets some great fight scenes, including an excitingly staged prison riot, while the steadily escalating war of words between him and The Rock provokes a good chuckle or five.
Statham's flair for combining violence with comedic absurdity a la Crank and The Transporter also allows the Brit to practically steal the film via a sequence in which he rescues an infant from a hoard of heavily armed thugs.
Moronic or not, fans will be thankful that the Fast & Furious saga shows no signs of slowing down.
FAST & FURIOUS 8 (12A, 136 mins) Action/Thriller/Romance. Vin Diesel, Dwayne Johnson, Charlize Theron, Jason Statham, Michelle Rodriguez, Tyrese Gibson, Chris 'Ludacris' Bridges, Kurt Russell, Scott Eastwood, Nathalie Emmanuel. Director: F Gary Gray
RATING: 6/10
