Fast and Furious 6

Directed by Justin Lin. Written by Chris Morgan, Gary Scott Thompson (characters) Starring Vin Diesel (Dominic Toretto), Paul Walker (Brian O'Conner), Dwayne Johnson (Hobbs).

Bottom line: Fast and Furious 6 is ridiculous but not really in a good way. I would pass on this unless you are a solid fan of the franchise.
1/4

By this point in the franchise, Fast and Furious has enough momentum that it can cruise with relatively little variation. Take the intro credits for this, the latest addition, Furious 6. It is a montage of major scenes of the previous movies. Should I then adjust my reviewing point of reference from a generic action movie to that of other Fast and Furious movies? That is, instead of asking, ‘is Furious 6 a good movie,’ I might ask, ‘is Furious 6 a good Fast and Furious movie.’

I’m joking…kind of. I am joking in the sense that if you are a fan of the franchise, you are probably going to go see this and, by this point, these movies have been coming out for a decade. After all, you have probably already determined whether or not you are a fan. At the same time, maybe you have just been absent. I, for example, have only recently discovered that I am a fan of the Star Trek franchise, which has been around since 1966. With this in mind, the question then becomes, ‘is Furious 6 the movie that gets you hooked on the franchise’. In a word: doubtful. Maybe, before I go any further, I should describe my relationship with Fast and Furious. I haven’t seen all of them but I have seen enough of them to understand the plot so while I can watch this one, I am not emotionally invested from the onset.

Furious 6 follows Agent Hobbs (Johnson) as he tracks down a formidable international criminal name Shaw (Evans). Hobbs needs a team to lead to an arrest so he turns to Dom Toretto (Deisel) and friends to help. They were the best hijackers in the world and will be able to provide professional insight. Their payment for assistance is an official pardon. Since the last movie, if I recall correctly, they have been living in Costa Rica or the Bahamas to avoid arrest at the hands of the US Authorities. Initially, Dom is hesitates. What changes his mind is a recently taken picture of his ex-girlfriend, Letty (Rodriguez). She supposedly died in a previous movie. You might think this is kinda romantic; a man risking his life with the slightest hope that his girlfriend is still alive. Well, then we would have to forget the fact that Dom enters this movie in bed with another woman who was Hobb’s former partner. This is starting to sound like a soap opera. Anyway, Dom calls his friends back together and they start tracking down the villain.

Even though I wasn’t expecting anything from Furious 6, I was still disappointed. I think it was more annoyance than disappointment, actually. It irritates me that this Furious 6 readies itself for a seventh movie despite the fact that it fails to contribute anything. Now that I think about it, you can just watch the first 10 seconds of the trailer and you know what to expect from the movie. Let me list the shots. Long shot of a car, medium shot of a woman (in a pink school girl outfit dancing), long shot of a group of women dancing on a stage, long shot of a car (with a couple, out of focus, bikini clad legs passing through the frame), women in a swim suit exiting a car, close up women dancing in hot pants (from the waist to the knees), long shot of car, close up of car, Vin Diesel. I don’t know what I was expecting… Note that we gaze at cars almost as much as we do at women. I’m not going to really touch dialogue because there wasn’t any of substance.

As I watched Fast and Furious 6 (aka Furious 6), I asked myself a question which makes writing this review somewhat difficult; at what point does a movie become a cartoon? Just from one of the initial chase scenes, we have this super-criminal driving an overcharged go-kart through city streets. Hobbs, in his appropriately sized hummer, is able to make chase until he jumps onto the villain’s vehicle. The go-kart drives into a wooden barrier to knock Hobbs to the ground. Don’t worry about the fact that he fell nearly a story onto the car only to be thrown to the concrete going 50mph. He’s The Rock. He is fine. This isn’t the exemplary scene that occurs during another one of the several chase scenes.

Letty is riding on a tank driving at high speed down a freeway bridge hundreds of feet above the rocky coast. Dom, driving a Hot Wheels car in the other lane, sees that the tank is going to flip over launching Letty to her death. He opens his car door, hangs onto the side of the car and drives it into the median. He ejects from the car just as Letty catapults from the tank. They collide and land, unharmed, on the hood of a parked car. Now, I am a fan of suspension of disbelief but this is getting a little out of hand. How can a movie be suspenseful with these types of shenanigans going down?

Even the driving premise of the movie is silly. Letty wasn’t actually killed in the earlier movie. She was in a coma for a couple days and now suffers from amnesia. Shaw picks her up from the hospital and the two have been committing vehicular-based crime since. Did I mention that this sounds like a soap opera? By the end of the movie, physical dangers or character “deaths” mean nothing to me.

Now, Fast and Furious consistently deals with the idea of family and loyalty. In Furious 6, the conflict is between family and efficiency. Shaw is of the mindset that a team is an accumulation of parts. When one doesn’t work, switch it out for another and repeat this process until you meet with success. Dom, on the other hand, sees his team as his family; he takes their strengths with their weaknesses. One scene, which helps distinguish Letty from her new, villainous crew is when she informs Shaw of a teammate’s death. Shaw simply says, “If he died it is because he made a mistake.” “Is that what you want us to say if that would happen to you,” she bitterly replies. Quite honestly, I don’t blame him. If I was in charge of a team in the high risk and dangerous world of international crime, I would feel more comfortable with this sort of accountability. Besides, by the end of the movie, the family for which Dom and Letty stand ignores the death of a lesser member. I suppose “family” means immediate family.

I am not sure but I feel like I should be mildly offended with respect to race. We have one African American character say to another “You have any change [for a snack]?” “Seriously? You’re a millionare yet you still tryin’ to ask for money?” “That’s how you stay a millionaire.” As he puts the change into the snack machine, Hobbs shoots the machine and says, “It’s on the house.” The guy looks around, shrugs and starts going through the snacks. Now, this gets my racism sense tingling. Am I wrong? There are other questionable scenes but I don’t particularly want to delve into it.

The question is do I recommend Furious 6? Negative, Ghost Rider. Go see something else. Re-watch the first one if you like but don’t waste your time on this. The chase sequences aren’t enough to justify the ludicrous plot, lame dialogue, sexism and racism. It simply isn’t worth it.