My oldest daughter came back from college and told me I needed to see something called “Galavant” on the television. We don’t do cable in my house so I Youtubed some trailers, got hooked, and checked it out on Amazon Instant Video.

Galavant is a trope-ridden medieval fantasy comedy musical. How such a thing existed without me knowing about it without the help of my children reflects poorly on me.

If you enjoyed the musical episodes of Buffy and Community, if you sing along with Doctor Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, you should buy Season 1 of Galavant on one of the services where it’s available (Amazon, Google Play, and iTunes.) I bought the HD version on Amazon and have now watched the whole thing three times through.

I’m not a fan of the streaming model, where I pay “own the whole thing” prices, but can’t actually watch unless I have a persistent connection and a DRM-ish browser window. Galavant is good enough that I’m perfectly happy to tell myself that I paid $20 to rent it. I got 176 minutes of great programming. I’ve spent more than that for movies half that long, and no lie, if Galavant were a theatrical release I would rank it above everything I’ve seen so far this year, including The Avengers. In fact, I came home from The Avengers excited to hurry up and write a review so I could watch Galavant.

Seriously, when it comes out on Blu-Ray I’ll probably buy it again.

Am I gushing? Yes. I don’t do this often.

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.