The breakout scenes of “The Fate of the Furious” don’t belong to Vin Diesel or new villain, Charlize Theron. Neither do they belong to the two over-the-top action sequences in the series’ eighth installment.
The real star of “The Fate of the Furious” is Jason Statham, the finest addition to the “Fast” franchise since The Rock in “Fast Five.”
The real stars of “The Fast and the Furious” are Jason Statham and a baby.
You read that right. The man who maliciously ran down and killed fan-favorite Han and blew up Dom’s Los Angeles home in “Furious 7,” is going to win you over.
One of the biggest bummers of “Furious 7” is that we never see Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham), a decorated British special forces assassin, take out a large group of people. Agent Hobbs (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson) tells Dom that Shaw once took out 20 elite operatives on his own, supposedly.
“Fate” more than makes up for that with Shaw taking out more men than you can count throughout the film on his own. It’s like “The Fast and the Furious” franchise took all the best parts of “Crank” — in which Statham plays a professional hit man — and carried them over to the “Fast” movies.
“Fate” uses Statham to its full advantage as he’s seen flipping off of prison cages and taking down men to get his way out of the place in an early scene.
It’s one of the single most enjoyable scenes of the entire movie. And that’s not even the best scene with Statham.
While he has some incredible banter with the Rock, the best scene in “The Fate of the Furious” happens when Jason Statham’s Deckard Shaw takes down a plane full of men while holding a baby. And not just any baby. He’s protecting Dominic Toretto’s baby boy in a car seat.
It’s downright hilarious to see this tough-as-nails, ex-British assassin sweetly cooing to an infant and giving him a blow by blow of their current situation in between brutally murdering a bunch of Cipher’s minions.
He slides him off to the side at one point so he takes care of business, but most of the time, he’s deftly taking men out with one hand while juggling little Toretto in the other.
The best part is that before the fight even begins, Shaw places a set of headphones over the baby’s ears and puts on “The Chipmunk Song” to keep him occupied as Shaw moves from one man to the next. After nearly every take down, he comes back to the smiling babe to check in to make sure he’s doing okay.
