Filip’s review published on Letterboxd:
Are there really people who think this is the best movie in the series? Looks like we didn't watch the same movie.
I just don't know who thought it was a good idea to replace all the characters from the previous movies? How interesting these new characters are says enough that the best moment in the whole movie is when Vin Diesel appears.
I mean, I understand that they wanted to move to some new location, and Japan is very interesting, but it was definitely not done right.
The main character is so terrible that it's hard to describe. Lucas Black plays a character who isn't even 18 years old yet, and he looks like he's at least 30. And with all that, his acting is really bad. Sean is a painfully average, unimpressive and annoying character–a cocky spoiled rich kid, something we have seen so many times.
Nathalie Kelley is a classic female character from the F&F franchise, a beautiful woman who, apart from being beautiful, doesn't have much to offer. But let's say she was ok, nothing more. I can't believe they offered her as a prize? Crazy...
Sung Kang's character(Han) is actually the only character I cared about in this movie. Highly charismatic and deeply mysterious charachter, unfortunately one of those that we don't learn a lot about in this movie, but mysterious aspect of his charachter is fun to unravel as movie progress.
Brian Tee(Takashi) is an "Asian movie villain" cliché charachter. He is a spoiled teenager whose uncle is a member of the Yakuza mafia, so he thinks that makes him very important. Anyway, nothing new and nothing special.
I won't even try to talk about the plot, it's really not worth wasting words. I'm not even saying that the plot in the prequels movies was anything special, actually it was also dumb, but this is definitely dumber and seems like an insult to the intelligence of the viewers.
And when you put together one-dimensional, flat, uncreative characters who are at the same time acted below average, with bad plot, this is what you get.
If anything, the action part of the movie remained good. Racing, stunts, drifting, beautiful and fast cars, all of that works well in this movie as well as in the previous ones, probably even better. All those scenes really look nice, well shot, well directed. But honestly it's not enough for me.
Overall, this is for me definitely worst of the 3 F&F movies I've seen for now. Not only is it not the best movie in the franchise, it's a shame that it even compares to the first movie.
I can understand that for some it is better than the second movie, because it wasn't really nothing special either(for me still better than this mainly because they kept Paul Walker and story is somewhat better), but any comparison with the first one is really disrespectful.