Remember when the “Fast and Furious” movies used to have something
to do with street racing? Yes, cars and driving still play heavily into the
newer iterations of this long-running series of silliness, but as the decade
has rolled over into a new realm of eye-assaulting, high-octane, summer action,
people just don’t have the time to settle into a simple racing movie anymore. With this in mind, the people behind 2011’s “Fast
Five” and this year’s “Fast & Furious 6”, have repurposed these films to be
larger, higher-concept action fiestas that include large-scale bank heists,
tank chases, global terrorism, and flaming airplanes. As Tyrese Gibson so
eloquently stated in the last film, “This just went from mission impossible to
mission in-freakin-sanity!”
Using
the last sequel as a new plateau to build from, this film doesn’t really
reference the rest of the franchise all that much. The exception being that in
this movie the crew (Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Tyrese Gibson, Ludacris, Jordana
Brewster, and Sung Kang) are searching for Torreto’s (Diesel) ex-girlfriend
Letty (Michelle Rodriguez), who was previously thought to be dead in one of the
past sequels. With some complicated plot contrivances involving the British
baddies of this story, Letty has been successfully revived, only to become an
amnesiac working for a dangerous crime-lord named Shaw (Luke Evens).
Also, if you recall, Dwayne –“The
Rock”—Johnson has become a very key figure in this world as the fast-talking,
one-liner dispensing FBI agent named Hobbs.
This film begins where the last one left off, where Hobbs finds Torreto
in his South American hideout to tell him that Letty is still alive. To bridge their feud, he offers to help find
her and ensure the whole crew their freedom if they can lend their totally dope
racing skills to bring down this new criminal threat.
Where
“Fast Five” intended to change a franchise about drag racing into a heist film,
“Fast & Furious 6” has now turned this into James Bond, “Die Hard” and
“Mission Impossible” all at the same time—only with more gusto, more
explosions, and less sense making.
In what is perhaps the best disclaimer ever in
the history of film disclaimers, at the end of movie, before the credits, the
makers of the film remind us that the car stunts performed are only for
entertainment purposes and shouldn’t be copied or attempted by those viewing
(or something like that). I suppose that this would be sound advice if any of
these stunts were physically possible to attempt. Unlike a “Jackass” movie, the mathematical realities
of this film could probably only be recreated in a video game, as cars are
flipped, flung, toppled and propelled like rubbers balls in a gymnasium. To ask audiences to carefully observe this as
fiction would be like cautioning people that Superman is not real and that
attempting to fly might result in their bodily harm or death.
Whatever.
This movie is stupid. All of these movies are stupid but not all of them are
fun. And despite the fact that the plot
is forced and somewhat ordinary, the villain is laughably evil, and the
dialogue is achingly lame, this movie can be a lot fun. It’s probably not as
tight or as well conceived as its 2011 predecessor, and it could certainly due
without as much plodding exposition, but I got a kick out of how overblown and
escalated the action-inducing situations have become. If it were up to me the
next one would be in outer space!
Grade: C+
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