Let me preface this by saying that I was saddened by Paul Walker’s passing, more than a little conflicted at the tragic irony of the manner of his death, and that I haven’t really been following the whole Fast, Furious, and Franchised story.

This means that despite the over-the-top action and comic book physics of Furious 7, things that should aim it straight at me, I’m only a peripheral member of the film’s target audience.

With that out of the way: Ugh.

Furious 7 spent far too much time wallowing in manufactured drama that it did not bother to earn. The film seemed to assume that I had been passionately tracking the various F&F character arcs, and was eager to be dropped straight into the kind of moist-eyed, conflicted navel-gazing that most films take an act and a half to set up.

My viewing experience can be summed up as follows.

1. They are talking a LOT. I’ll try to care.
2. Nope. Caring isn’t going to work for me. GET BACK IN THE CARS.
3. Yay cars! And fighting! Why is there shaky cam? I can’t see what’s going on!
4. Go to 1.

This went on for two hours and ten minutes, followed by a weird meander into a tribute to Paul Walker which, had it been any more thinly veiled would have been a documentary. And then the credits rolled, and 140 minutes felt far too long for what was basically a set-piece superhero-heist where all of the super powers are indistinguishable flavors of “make cars do absurd things” and “walk away from a rollover that any highway patrolman can tell you is not survivable.”

I’m glad that Paul Walker’s friends got to turn the end of the movie into a farewell, because that’s a nice thing, and I believe more people should be nice, but it felt like it belonged at the end of a different movie.

Furious 7 committed a couple of unforgivable sins: It jumbled up Jason Statham’s fight scenes with jitter-cam, and then did the same thing to Rhonda Rousey’s fight. These are both top-notch physical performers, and their appearances were squandered. That’s sin #1 (though it should count as two.) Sin #2 is that the film took itself very seriously while still expecting me to believe in parachuting cars that can hit a remote mountain highway.

The good news is that I finally have a 2015 film that drops below my threshold of disappointment, providing  the beginnings of symmetry to this year’s list.

I really liked Home, though it surprised me straight out of the gate with an unexpected, and pretty hard-to-swallow premise: the aliens invade and relocate the humans to Australia, and the human military is nowhere to be seen.

To quote Harrison Ford, on the set of Star Wars when Mark Hamill had a continuity concern, “Hey, kid… it ain’t that kind of movie.”

So… my expectations were set very early on, and then the movie proceeded to do wonderful things. I had a great time. Rihanna performed brilliantly as Tip, and Jim Parsons managed to sell “deep and meaningful” while nailing “silly” in his voicing of Oh.

I’ll admit, things were just a little too “tidy” for my tastes (How to Train Your Dragon spoiled me) but the film was delightful, and not only clears my Threshold of Awesome, it scoots every other film down a notch by being the most fun I’ve had in the theater so far this year.

I didn’t see Divergent (the first movie in the trilogy of which Insurgent is the second) because I found the whole premise too ridiculous to swallow, and while I like a single-threaded thought experiment as much as the next person (read: “they’re okay, but can I see the dinner menu?”)  the film itself didn’t look like it was going to reward my patience.

Insurgent, on the other hand, put some really cool visuals on display in the trailers. Also, the local IMAX has $5.00 showings on Tuesdays. I decided that for $5.00 I would shell out two hours for the chance to see those visuals all big and pretty-like.

The movie took far too long to get to them.

The story being told by the film, the CORE story, the protagonist’s journey, could have been told very well in a tight, 88-minute film that showcased not just the special effects, but also the impressive range of emotion that Shailene Woodley can bring to the screen.

Instead, it did what book-to-film transductions usually do — it compressed the story of the book, fulfilling some promises made in the prior stories, and including along the way a big pile of stuff that didn’t really matter to the core story of the film itself.

I understand completely the drive to be epic in scope, but for me an epic needs to have more foundation than an absurd premise–and when I say “absurd” I don’t mean “fantastical” like rockets and ray-guns, or dragons and dwarves. I mean “absurd” like “let’s pretend human nature works THIS way instead.”

Ultimately, for me, Insurgent commits the venial sin of taking an extra 30 minutes to tell a story, and spending those 30 minutes wandering a crumbled-concrete wasteland that has long since lost its appeal (sometime before Fallout: New Vegas, I think. I need to check a calendar.) It comes in #4 for me fun-wise this year, but it does not clear the Threshold of Awesome.

On a semi-related note of clumsy silliness, I really liked the music, but when I went shopping for it I accidentally bought the Divergent score, by Junkie XL, who I had never heard of. It sounded kind of thin. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t what I’d remembered.

Then I realized my mistake, and went back to Amazon and bought the Insurgent score, by Joseph Trapanese. It sounds wonderful.

(Note: These are the film scores, not the soundtracks with the pop tunes on them.)