Furious 7 (2015)Movies

One of the four-thousand trailers that ran prior to my “Furious 7” screening Thursday night was for the upcoming James Bond entry “Spectre.” And what a bummer those 96 seconds are.  In Daniel Craig’s fourth go-round, the world is still colorless, Bond is still working through his prissy emotional baggage, and the tone is one of oppressive brooding seriousness. Nevertheless I don’t mourn the loss of a simpler and better era when a new Bond film promised a grand old escapist time at the movies. That, after all, is why God invented the “Fast and Furious” franchise. The most improbable mega-franchise in movie history launches its seventh chapter this weekend, and it is everything James Bond films used to be: insanely action-packed, exotic locales,...