‘Fate of the Furious’ Is the Greatest [Furious] Movie of All Time

Not for its cast, which includes some of the highest-paid actors in Hollywood in an alchemistic ensemble that had Oscar-winning actors begging to join the adventure. I’ll get to that. Not for its action, which is a hair more ridiculous than ever before, but I’ll get to that, too. Not even for its stakes, higher than any Furious film prior, the risk of nuclear war and the fate of the planet laid in the hands of our team of precision drivers. All such factors handily contribute to the greatness of the eighth installment of the Furious franchise but none fully explain it, none reach to the heart of what separates Fate of the Furious – the series’ first without the beloved heart of the franchise, Paul Walker – as the best possible addition to a series you might think has done it all already (it hasn’t). But one thing does: Fate of the Furious is the most Furious-franchise movie of all time. We should have known when it managed to cram every Furious cliché into a 3-minute trailer, that when Fast & Furious 6’s “all roads lead to here” became the Furious-est Furious we’d seen, that we hadn’t quite reached the ceiling because there is no ceiling, that we have so much yet to do if your heart is open. My heart is open, so when I saw Dom turn on his family I gasped. I clutched. Tears welled in my eyes; “that’s not Dom,” I said. “That’s not him,” more to convince myself than anyone listening (no one was listening to me, I am clearly alone). My heart is open, so I rifled through the p…