There’s this loud-mouth kid fresh out of college within earshot of my desk who drops hoity-toity nuggets like, “There’s no movie with The Rock in it worth seeing” or “You guys should really be watching the Stanley Cup Playoffs. It’s awesome TV.” Oh, how wrong you are, young sir.
We won’t talk more about hockey (no one else is). Instead, let’s focus on the sixth film in the re-tuned Fast & Furious series, called Furious 6 if you trust the title card. Like its predecessor, Fast Five — an Ocean’s 11 heist flick with a Blues Brothers-like adherence to physics — the underground street race culture has been traded in for a new model, a high-octane game of cat and mouse.
This go round, Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and his familial ensemble of millionaire motorhead misfits are on the good side of the law. After being deputized by Hobbs (played triumphantly once more by gym enthusiast Mr. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson), they’re tasked with tracking down their shadows selves — a rival gang of expert wheelmen out to build some sort of EMP (I think... it doesn’t really matter) and figure out why Toretto’s dead girlfriend, Letty (Michelle Rodriguez), ain’t as dead as she used to be.
What follows is an orgy of car stunts and fist fights. It’s an aerial ballet of crashing, crumbling cars raining glass and metal, featuring a trio of red, white and blue American muscle cars facing off against a tank, one of the more brutal on-screen lady fights you’ve ever seen, and a seemingly unlimited supply of grappling hook guns.
You could call F6 a guilty pleasure, but you shouldn’t. There is nothing guilty about this pleasure.
Uncalled-for fact checkers and fun-ruiners may whine about things like the lack of realism — be it the “physics” or “pardons being granted for subordinate actions taken by government personnel that would be met with the death penalty.” But mentioning a disregard for the laws of physics as a reason for disliking F6 is like mentioning a disregard for the laws of physics as a reason for disliking Looney Tunes. This is the sixth movie in a series of PG-13 car race/crash porn, and you feel the need to remind that it’s not the type of film we’d rocket into space as proof to other lifeforms of all that humanity is capable of?
This is two hours of: If there’s a vehicle moving at dangerous speeds, someone is about to jump off it. Everything’s bigger — the stunt pieces, the fight scenes, The Rock’s neck — and it’s an entertaining angst-free joyride.
My only major gripe is the 15 minutes or so of establishing exposition before we get to the real car action. But once we get to the first chase, it’s a redline race to the end. The final climactic chase, which is actually more like climax four or five, lasts for nearly 20 minutes and is akin to a non-stop roller coaster loop with speed metal blaring.
Furious 6’s attempts to be as batshit crazy as possible, and it succeeds. This success outweighs any failed attempts to pull the heartstrings or make me like Ludacris.
This is what you want to go see on a three-day weekend. This is the summertime cinema escapism we’ve been missing with the self-serious, blah blockbusters of sunny months past. True, hockey fan, you won’t leave the theater with more insight into what it is to be human. But, you may be tempted to speed a bit on the way home. (There’s a disclaimer at the end advising against this, but that’s like telling a kid to chill out after they’ve just slammed a glass of Kool-Aid.)
Sometimes you just need to be washed clean by the blissful absurdity of over-the-top car fantasy. After all, it’s been a pretty crappy spring, and we could all use a little escape.
A mostly spoiler-free note on the pre-credit's scene: If you’ve been keeping up with Fast & Furious canon — and who hasn’t — you’re probably aware of the fact that Han Seoul-Oh’s story comes to an end in the third part of the series (Tokyo Drift) though he appears in 4, 5 and 6. Well, that’s because films 1, 2, 4, 5 and 6 all take place before 3 — the first directed by Justin Lin. I wouldn't dare spoil how this is cleared up, but you might watch this scene from Tokyo Drift before F6 to better understand how the two films collide.
--Eric Pulsifer
We won’t talk more about hockey (no one else is). Instead, let’s focus on the sixth film in the re-tuned Fast & Furious series, called Furious 6 if you trust the title card. Like its predecessor, Fast Five — an Ocean’s 11 heist flick with a Blues Brothers-like adherence to physics — the underground street race culture has been traded in for a new model, a high-octane game of cat and mouse.
This go round, Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and his familial ensemble of millionaire motorhead misfits are on the good side of the law. After being deputized by Hobbs (played triumphantly once more by gym enthusiast Mr. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson), they’re tasked with tracking down their shadows selves — a rival gang of expert wheelmen out to build some sort of EMP (I think... it doesn’t really matter) and figure out why Toretto’s dead girlfriend, Letty (Michelle Rodriguez), ain’t as dead as she used to be.
What follows is an orgy of car stunts and fist fights. It’s an aerial ballet of crashing, crumbling cars raining glass and metal, featuring a trio of red, white and blue American muscle cars facing off against a tank, one of the more brutal on-screen lady fights you’ve ever seen, and a seemingly unlimited supply of grappling hook guns.
You could call F6 a guilty pleasure, but you shouldn’t. There is nothing guilty about this pleasure.
Uncalled-for fact checkers and fun-ruiners may whine about things like the lack of realism — be it the “physics” or “pardons being granted for subordinate actions taken by government personnel that would be met with the death penalty.” But mentioning a disregard for the laws of physics as a reason for disliking F6 is like mentioning a disregard for the laws of physics as a reason for disliking Looney Tunes. This is the sixth movie in a series of PG-13 car race/crash porn, and you feel the need to remind that it’s not the type of film we’d rocket into space as proof to other lifeforms of all that humanity is capable of?
This is two hours of: If there’s a vehicle moving at dangerous speeds, someone is about to jump off it. Everything’s bigger — the stunt pieces, the fight scenes, The Rock’s neck — and it’s an entertaining angst-free joyride.
My only major gripe is the 15 minutes or so of establishing exposition before we get to the real car action. But once we get to the first chase, it’s a redline race to the end. The final climactic chase, which is actually more like climax four or five, lasts for nearly 20 minutes and is akin to a non-stop roller coaster loop with speed metal blaring.
Furious 6’s attempts to be as batshit crazy as possible, and it succeeds. This success outweighs any failed attempts to pull the heartstrings or make me like Ludacris.
This is what you want to go see on a three-day weekend. This is the summertime cinema escapism we’ve been missing with the self-serious, blah blockbusters of sunny months past. True, hockey fan, you won’t leave the theater with more insight into what it is to be human. But, you may be tempted to speed a bit on the way home. (There’s a disclaimer at the end advising against this, but that’s like telling a kid to chill out after they’ve just slammed a glass of Kool-Aid.)
Sometimes you just need to be washed clean by the blissful absurdity of over-the-top car fantasy. After all, it’s been a pretty crappy spring, and we could all use a little escape.
A mostly spoiler-free note on the pre-credit's scene: If you’ve been keeping up with Fast & Furious canon — and who hasn’t — you’re probably aware of the fact that Han Seoul-Oh’s story comes to an end in the third part of the series (Tokyo Drift) though he appears in 4, 5 and 6. Well, that’s because films 1, 2, 4, 5 and 6 all take place before 3 — the first directed by Justin Lin. I wouldn't dare spoil how this is cleared up, but you might watch this scene from Tokyo Drift before F6 to better understand how the two films collide.
--Eric Pulsifer
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