GEAR FACTOR

Opening in the multiplexes this weekend...

Fast X--It has car chases. Just in case you were wondering.

In this, the tenth(ish) feature entry in the seemingly endless Fast and the Furious series about L.A. street racers turned freelance government agents, Vin Diesel and his pals are hassled through the streets of Rome, Rio, London, L.A., Portugal, etc. by a cheerful sociopath (Jason Momoa) with a vengeful grudge. It's lavishly and extravagantly produced, with a high-ticket cast, mostly playing characters from the earlier films.

The beauty and glamour and diversity of these people, including but not limited to Diesel and Michelle Rodriguez and Tyrese Gibson and Jason Statham and Nathalie Emmanuel and Daniela Melchior and Chris "Ludacris" Bridges and Jon Cena and Brie Larson and Sung Kang and Charlize Theron and, no kidding, Helen Mirren and Rita Moreno, if you please, is undeniable. Momoa is droll as the chatty villain. And even though the movie is overlong, the settings are sun-drenched and sumptuous, and I found it surprisingly less tedious than I expected to sit through.

But it's not cool. The many extended set-piece action sequences here are so preposterous that they make the James Bond flicks look like kitchen-sink realism. This silliness is not, in itself, what's pernicious about it, however. Even by action movie standards, Fast X is simply cavalier toward human life.

As with the earlier films, the message of this movie seems to be that it's nearly impossible to be seriously injured, or to injure a pedestrian, in a high-speed car chase through a densely-populated urban area. It suggests that cars can almost fly, and that people can almost fly between cars in midair, with surgical accuracy. It suggests that you have leisurely amounts of time to plan your maneuvers in a hurtling vehicle. It suggests that if you're thrown from a hurtling vehicle and land on pavement, you can get up and shake it off as if you'd tripped on a porch step. What this movie suggests that cars, and human bodies, can do and withstand is recklessly delusional, and to assume that it has no effect on the behavior of real-life drivers raised on movies like this seems naïve.

I don't want to be a killjoy. I've enjoyed many movie car chases over the years, and I enjoyed, albeit with a little guilt, some of this movie. But the Fast & Furious flicks take the seductive fantasy of invincible car action to a level that seems irresponsible to me. We hear a lot of complaints, from all quarters, about the negative influence of movies on, say, sexual morality, or racial perceptions, or the objectification of women, or toxic masculinity. Why can't the impact of movies on basic public safety be considered a moral issue?

DICED HAM

Opening this weekend:

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves--This movie includes more than one dungeon, and more than one dragon. Thus the title is truthful, at any rate.

Once or twice back in college--twice, if memory serves--I played Dungeons & Dragons with some of my fellow theater students. It was sort of fun, as I recall. The first time, an obnoxious kid we didn't know named Dan--not a theatre major--had somehow been invited, who seemed to think himself a great ladies' man. He named his warrior character "Dahn" and spent most of the evening drinking a lot and hitting on the young women there. When we played again a week or so later, Dan was not invited, and the Dungeon Master mildly informed us that "Dahn disagreed with something that ate him."

This was in the early '80s.  I recount this story only to make it clear how limited my familiarity is with the classic role-playing fantasy game developed in the mid-'70s and now owned by Wizards of the Coast (a subsidiary of Hasbro). I've never played D&D or any similar game since, though I have friends and family who are enthusiasts. Even at the time, I didn't really grasp how the dice rolls and "damage points" and other such jargon determined the flow of the game; I just enjoyed the socializing and improvisational creativity.

So for all I know, this new movie version, directed by Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley from a script they concocted with Michael Gilio and Chris McKay, is a rich and faithful fleshing-out of tropes from the game. Or, for all I know, it's just a sword-and-sorcery fantasy with the franchise's name hung on it. I can't say, nor need any general audience member care; either way, it's highly entertaining.

Chris Pine is a lute-strumming troubadour living in a Ren-Faire-ish realm of racial and gender diversity. A washed-up member of a heroic order, he leads a band of thieves including a warrior (Michelle Rodriguez); a sorcerer (Justice Smith) of low self-esteem and questionable prowess, and a horned and tailed elfin person (Sophia Lillis) who can shape-shift into various other creatures, including a brawny monster owl.

They're on a quest to obtain some sort of magical thingy that will allow them to enter a magic vault from which they want to steal some other magical thingy. This will allow the troubadour to resurrect his murdered wife. Along the way the band is helped by a noble but humorlessly literal paladin (Regé-Jean Page from Bridgerton).

This synopsis does the movie little justice, however. D&DHAT isn't heavy. Despite all the thundering hordes and clanking armor and clashing steel and roiling brimstone and mystical spells and hideous ogres and such, the flavor is less like a Tolkien epic than like a Hope-Crosby Road comedy. The guiding joke is that the characters, notwithstanding their fairy tale attire, speak and interact in a contemporary American idiom, like people on a sitcom. There's an extended schtick, involving questioning of the dead, that's almost worthy of the Marx Brothers.

Your own tastes will determine if this approach makes the movie a blast or an outrage. For me, it not only made it less ponderous, but more emotionally satisfying. The actors generate an ensemble playfulness and a sense of affection. Pine retains his raffish agreeability, and he and Rodriguez are particularly convincing as longtime, patiently enduring friends.

But once again, the best reason to see the film, even if this sort of fantasy isn't your usual tankard of mead, is Hugh Grant. He plays the rotten mountebank who betrayed Pine and friends back in the day. Since then, with the alliance of a sinister sorceress (Daisy Head), this fraud has ascended to the throne of the kingdom; it's his vault the gang wants to loot, and he's also, intolerably, been serving as the surrogate father to Pine's daughter (Chloe Coleman).

Between this movie, the recent Operation Fortune and 2017's Paddington 2, Grant has quite a line these days in cheery, good-natured comic villains. The scenes he steals here are the most honorable theft in the movie.

EVEN BLUE GIRLS GET THE BLUES

Opening this week:

Smurfs: The Lost Village—The third entry in Sony's Smurf series focuses on Smurfette, the lone female among the tiny blue-skinned residents of Smurf Village. The first two films in this series, from 2011 and 2013, were both directed by Raja Gosnell and mixed animation with live action. The Lost Village is all animated, and eschews any visits to the human world. The plot concerns the discovery of a previously unknown neighboring Smurf village, and the quest by Smurfette and some of her friends to warn its inhabitants of a threat from the sinister wizard Gargamel and his much more observant cat Azreal.

In case you've managed to remain unfamiliar with the elfin race created in the late '50s by the Belgian cartoonist Pierre "Peyo" Culliford, the Smurfs (originally "Les Schtroumpfs") are named according to their defining characteristic, as in Brainy Smurf, Clumsy Smurf, Nosey Smurf, Paranoid Smurf, etc. Only Smurfette lacks a signature trait. She has a rather Manichaean backstory, having been created by Gargamel as an agent against the Smurfs, then won over to the side of light by exposure to their relentless niceness. But she feels incomplete without her very own adjective.

The movie's acknowledgement of the presumption, longstanding in the narrative traditions of our culture, that Smurfette's gender is sufficient by itself to define her, is potentially interesting. But nothing much is done with it, beyond acknowledgement, and otherwise this is a pretty by-the-numbers animated kid flick. It's watchable enough, but about the most that can be said for it is that it's inoffensive.

Demi Lovato replaces the earlier film's Katy Perry as the voice of Smurfette, while Rainn Wilson does his usual droll work as the voice of Gargamel, replacing the live-action version of Hank Azaria. Mandy Patinkin replaces the late Jonathan Winters as Papa Smurf, while the leader of the newly discovered village is voiced by Julia Roberts. Strange to think that the Pretty Woman herself is ready for matriarch roles.

SPEED KILLS

Opening this weekend:

Furious Seven—My mother always hated car chase movies. She used to take me to the live-action Disney comedies of the early ‘70s irritably, under protest, because they routinely ended with a wacky car chase. A few years later, she was appalled when one of my nephews became an avid fan of The Dukes of Hazzard, and insisted on getting in the car through the open window.

Over the years I’ve enjoyed many a movie car chase, but at some deep psychological level I’ve always felt a little guilt over this, knowing that my Mom wouldn’t approve. That feeling was magnified while I watched this seventh entry in the Fast and the Furious series. The accident that killed star Paul Walker in 2013 wasn’t part of the film’s production (nor was Walker driving). But it was speed-related, and it’s hard to overcome the sense that movies like this franchise—the implicit message of which is that it’s impossible to be seriously injured in a car crash—may contribute to mishaps like this.

In a showpiece scene of Furious 7 [spoiler alert!], Vin Diesel and Walker drive a high-performance car out of the upper-floor window of a high-rise building. They sail through the air into the windows of the neighboring high-rise, then across that building and out the far side, through the air again into a third high-rise. When Diesel begins barreling toward the windows, Walker yells “Cars can’t fly! Cars can’t fly!” but there’s no sign that director James Wan agrees. This and other scenes inevitably have a macabre extra resonance.

The story has Diesel’s street racing gang turned government agents stalked by vengeful Brit special forces rogue Jason Statham. Djimon Hounsou is another heavy, Dwayne Johnson is the lead G-man, Michelle Rodriguez is back with her beguiling Snoopy-vulture scowl, and Kurt Russell saunters in for a few entertaining scenes as a shifty covert ops honcho. All of the actors, starting with the always-endearing Diesel, are agreeable, and the dialogue is so self-consciously macho, the action so cartoonishly overscaled that it’s hard to resist the idea that the whole thing is a put-on, and start enjoying the silliness.

But every time a vehicle plummeted off a cliff in the Caucasus only to have its passengers emerge looking better than I do after a good night’s sleep, every time somebody leapt from one vehicle to another with barely a bruise, every time a car jumped from a parking garage and delivered a duffel bag to a helicopter in flight, some party-pooper part of me couldn’t help but think, this sort of vehicular fantasy, seductive even for a non-gearhead like me, isn’t harmless. The mindset it creates may have contributed to the death of one of this movie’s own stars.

Furious 7 is overlong, like many action blockbusters, but I can’t claim that I wasn’t diverted by some of the movie’s preposterous excesses. But it still may qualify as one of the stupider, more irresponsible movies I’ve ever seen, and when it made me smile, I thought I could sense my Mom scowling at me.