‘Fate of the Furious’ Has a Ball in the Big Apple in This New Featurette

Up until last week, I was a proud resident of New York City, which meant  —  like most New Yorkers  —  I avoided Times Square like the plague. Even transferring between trains at Times Square could be a frustrating exercise in crowd management; when it comes to actually getting behind the wheel myself, I would gladly drive around the entire island of Manhattan twice before I would risk driving anywhere between Union Square and Central Park. That makes the New York setting of The Fate of the Furious an exercise in wish fulfillment for me. Forget street racing and international espionage; I just want to experience what it’s like to drive through Times Square at more than five miles an hour.

The latest featurette for The Fate of the Furious (via Heroic Hollywood) promises all that and more, with new footage from the movie’s Manhattan car chase and both Vin Diesel and director F. Gary Gray discussing the logistics of shutting down one of the busiest streets in the world. Those who know Diesel’s backstory as a struggling actor growing up in New York City  —  wait, y’all don’t have that information available at a moment’s notice?  —  know that this is a special moment for the actor as well. Young athletes dream of playing in the World Series or the NBA Finals in front of their home crowd; Diesel gets to shut down Times Square so he can crash cars against a backlight of neon billboards. It doesn’t get much better than that.

Here’s the full synopsis for The Fate of the Furious:

Now that Dom and Letty are on their honeymoon and Brian and Mia have retired from the game  —  and the rest of the crew has been exonerated  —  the globetrotting team has found a semblance of a normal life. But when a mysterious woman seduces Dom into the world of crime he can’t seem to escape and a betrayal of those closest to him, they will face trials that will test them as never before.

The Fate of the Furious will do one of those emergency brake spin-thingies into theaters on April 14, 2017.