If Fast & Furious 6 could be encapsulated by a song title it would be Daft Punk’s “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger.” Well better than parts 2-4 anyway. We’re a long way from the simple charm of the 2001 original. No longer content to limit the vehicles to just automobiles, this installment has got planes, tanks and yes cars too. The Fast and the Furious franchise is about raising the stakes. The series’ somewhat stale preoccupation with street racing was re-invented into a heist film in installment 5. The latter Fast and the Furious sequels have morphed into the Ocean’s Eleven of chase movies. Fast 6 continues that camaraderie by re-assembling Dom and his crew of experts to do another “job,” the takedown of a rogue team of drivers led by a British (natch) Special Forces soldier.
The old gang is back including expanded roles for more recent additions to the party. The cast has grown exponentially since the first installment. The script takes for granted you know these characters so it doesn’t waste time trying to define them. You are expected to have seen parts 1-5 and adore these people the moment they appear. An overused narrative shortcut is the obligatory European as the bad guy, Luke Evans as a generic terrorist named Owen Shaw. I guess Mark Strong was busy. Dwayne Johnson shows up wearing a t-shirt purchased at BabyGap. He’s Luke Hobbs, the preening CIA operative who apparently has a lot of free time to spend working out at the gym. How else to account for his absolutely ridiculous pumped up physical frame? Johnson is so seriously inflated he looks as if he were punctured by a pin, he’d just pop. He only recently became part of this franchise with Fast Five, but has since become a key component. Conversely Paul Walker (remember him?) blandly fades further into the background. Oops I almost forgot to mention this boasts the return of Michelle Rodriguez as Letty who died in Part 4. If that sounds impossible, please read on.
Fast & Furious 6 is not a movie to think about. It’s for people who want familiar characters, lots of cool stunts, and a few jokes tossed in for good measure. On that front, this delivers. The WTF quotient is incredibly high. But that’s par for the course. This series has never involved sense. Fast Five‘s dragging a cumbersome bank vault through the streets of Rio at high speed is more an affront to physics than anything in this production. Still 6 pushes the envelope once again and tries to outdo that ridiculousness. The most explosive spectacle has our team zooming down an airplane runway on a jeep chasing an Antonov An-124, a massive Russian airplane, at over 100mph for about 15 minutes. don’t think too hard, but yeah that would make the runway at least 25 miles long. Of course none of this will matter to steadfast fans. It’s one of those films whose adherents decry such critiques with “Quiet! Your intellectualization is my buzzkill!!”
The narrative has been structured in such a way that the action sequences are the film. In between we get a lot of blah-blah-blah that is a comparative bore to endure until the next assault, These vehicular feats have continued to explode with each successive entry in a seemingly never-ending pursuit to top the last. Physics be damned! Applying logic or sense to any of these pictures is kind of irrelevant but the characters should at least involve our concern. Dom Toretto (Vin Diesel) cannot die. We’re never even remotely worried our hero could be finished. At one point Letty is flung off a tank, Dom leaps, no FLIES through the sky, catches her in mid air then travels to the safety of a second moving car. It’s a display that looks more like CGI than actual stunt work but it also creates a problem. His ability to cheat death kind of removes any tension you might feel. We should be on the on the edge of our seat but we’re no longer concerned. It just feels like routine now. A formula that eschews sophistication in the name of “mindless entertainment.” Should we cheer? My theater did. Most loudly at the end when the entire production builds to the reveal of yet another character – a certain shaved head action star. It’s as if to say, this was all just a tease to the real movie. Now go watch Fast & Furious 7…in 3D no doubt.
Fast Film Reviews 
Leave a comment