The most ridiculous film ever made: ‘Fast & Furious 6’

Released May 24, 2013
ALL ROADS LEAD TO THIS, BRUH!

Fast & Furious 6 begins with Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker, or bobo Bradley Cooper) furiously drag racing down a mountain somewhere exotic, nearly careening off the sides as they try to pass each other. It turns out, where these two meatheads are headed is the hospital where Brian’s first child was born. Why would a man feel it appropriate to drag race to his child’s birth? More simply, why would a man feel comfortable drag racing to his child’s birth? What if he goes flying off that fucking cliff! What happens then, Paul Walker? Does your wife, Mia (Jordana Brewster), just raise your child alone? These questions, and others, you will have to push to the far, far recesses of your brain if you want to enjoy this movie. Also, you need to accept that this is a series of movies that features only stone cold violent psycho and sociopaths doing what psycho and sociopaths do best, which is royally fuck shit up for absolutely no reason. This is the kind of movie that can’t really be made anymore, post 9/11 and everything else, without you constantly taking note of how intensely psychopathic the characters are. A movie like this, where a tank crushes dozens of innocent people in their cars, could have been made in the 90’s with Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sylvester Stallone or Steven Segal, and it’d be run-of-the-mill. Now it’s just completely, entirely offensive in the best possible way. After the drag-racing-to-the-hospital sequence — Is it safe to drag race to a hospital? I mean the roads are quite narrow what if there’s an ambulance ahead? Oh, these characters would just hit the ambulance and send it over the side of the mountain, no worries guys — The Rock is introduced. His introductory scene is him going in to interrogate a guy he believes is Vin Diesel, discovering that it isn’t Vin Diesel, and then literally destroying the room with the guy anyway. He just tosses this fucking guy around like a rag doll, shooting him so far up into the ceiling that there’s a crater. The walls are destroyed, not to mention the table. And the guy is only moaning on the ground. And then The Rock looks at the guys behind the mirror and gives a sorta, “Whaddya gonna do?” shrug. By the way, the second thing he does immediately after he uses a person to demolish a building is to shoot a vending machine, exploding it’s contents, and announces “It’s on the house.” This man should 100% not be trusted with a firearm. Then there’s another scene, which seems like it came straight from a movie from 1998, where Ludacris and The Rock literally rob an upper crust British car salesman after he tells Ludacris, “You are clearly not a ‘Baller’, sir.” So Ludacris buys a bunch of cars, and then tells the guy to give him his shirt, pants, and watch. The character’s we’re supposed to identify with are morally corrupted criminals. All the better. If you’re a loyal reader of this blog, or someone that has to share company with me on any occasion, you’ll know that the only action movies I enjoy watching are the ones that are completely fucking ridiculous, and Fast & Furious 6 is just that. Finally the series has learned to have fun with it’s outrageous concept, and it shows in full force. This is a strange franchise. It had one straight forward sequel, 2 Fast 2 Furious, then the third, Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift, was an in-name sequel only, and then the fourth, The Fast and the Furious, brought it back to the main characters. The franchise essentially rebooted itself twice, once with the fourth installment, which was essentially a remake of the first film I understand, and a second time with Fast Five, which changed the entire tone of the series from street racing to heist flick, and The Rock’s character was introduced and all the characters from all of the movies (even Sung Kang from Tokyo Drift) were brought together. It’s also odd because the cast is comprised mainly of has-been actors who were big in 2001 when the first film came out but have since proved to be nothing much. Walker, Diesel, and Jordana Brewster have absolutely nothing else going on. Even Michelle Rodriguez isn’t doing much, but something is more than nothing. No bankable stars, dodgy franchise reputation. Why are these movies so massively successful? Do people love cars that much? There was a great deal of back lash after the genre change-up with the last movie, but Fast & Furious 6 has had the biggest opening of the entire series and quite possibly of all time.

“I wanna talk to you bout family, bruh.”

I’m not familiar with this series — I’ve only seen number one and five, and I actually walked out on three and four, which I’m just realizing now, three because it was bad, four because I was drunk, I think — and was not that impressed with either. I thought the action sequences in Fast Five were pretty impressive, but the movie was 125 minutes with 25 minutes of action and 100 minutes of sub-Ocean’s 11 heist business and lots of talk about family and loyalty. This installment takes everything that has worked with the previous movies (that I’ve seen) and fuses them all together. Unfortunately, it keeps the bloated running time and insistence on preaching about family. Seriously, who the fuck made the Fast and Furious franchise the poet laureate for family values? And there is no reason this needed to be 130 minutes. This could’ve been 100, easy. Remember the good old days when action movies were like 90-98 minutes? Perfect! The extra 30 minutes here accounts for more talk about family and loving what you have and a bunch of shit like that, and a protracted double climax that actually fucking rocks, so that’s acceptable. All the family talk, it can go. It’s so goofy at this point. Like, it’s expected that at some point in these movies two big slabs of meat will sit down with a cold beer and talk about the values of family. It’s just the funniest, most tedious thing ever. And they do it so much here! It’s like family values porn. And none of these people are good actors, so why are we giving everyone so much time to have a story? Actually, not everyone is a bad actor. Just Vin Diesel and Paul Walker who — OOPS! — have to carry the movie. The Rock is a really great actor, honestly. I think he has a tremendous presence and charisma and impeccable comedic timing. He was hysterical in even the limp and ugly Pain and Gain. Ludacris is hilarious and needs to be in way more movies, and the same goes for Tyrese Gibson and Sung Kang. Those three make for a surprisingly successful trio of comedians. Gina Carano, the MMA fighter-turned-actress from Haywire, plays The Rock’s partner and while she is saddled with nearly all the expository dialogue, she acquits herself admirably as an actress. She has a very natural delivery that makes her performance the most strangely believable in the entire movie, as she embodies a no-nonsense, hard bitten cop. Or DEA person. Or whatever the fuck her and Dwayne are supposed to be. I don’t think she’ll ever be called to the Oscar podium, but she has enough acting talent and natural charm — not to mention two badass fight scenes with Michelle Rodriguez — that she’ll comfortably find herself in more roles after this. The characters are what make the movie work, especially considering the plot is total incomprehensible gobbledy gook nonsense. This is yet another action movie where everyone wants “the chip”, this one apparently holding the key to a huge bombing…I think? Cue two hours of awesome car stunts to find this chip…GO! This is the first movie in this series that opens the world up and makes it more of an ensemble piece, which is incredibly satisfying. Now you can spend more time with The Rock cracking skulls and Ludacris and Tyrese cracking jokes than with boring bobo Bradley Cooper and stupid Vin Diesel and his dull romance with hot/dull Michelle Rodriguez. Vin Diesel seems to have absolutely no control over his face, by the way. I believe he must have been suffering tiny strokes during every single take.

WHAT?! Some of the stuff in here is seriously cool, though.

When the characters shut their stupid god damn mouths and get in cars, the movie soars. The action scenes are expertly staged and shot, and paced much better than in Fast Five. There’s also a lot more action, so less of the movie is stupid bullshit. This installment takes the crazy bank vault car chase climax of the last movie and says, “OK, we’re gonna top that in the first two minutes.” And they do! There’s this crazy car chase with a car that flips other cars into more cars, and all the vehicular destruction is real so it’s incredibly satisfying to watch, not like those CG’d car crashes. There’s a climactic sequence involving a tank let loose on a highway, driven by the bad guys as they try to evade Diesel and the Gang. First of all, there are hundreds of civilian casualties in this scene, just as there were at the end of the last movie. We don’t see any of them, of course, but how you can crush a moving car with your tank and not kill someone, I’m not sure. This scene is so fucking ballistic. I can’t describe it because you’ve really gotta see it, but it should be enough to say that there’s a tank blowing shit up, and at one point Vin Diesel literally jumps about a hundred yards to catch Michelle Rodriguez in the air to save her from plummeting to her death, and it is absolutely one of the funniest scenes in recent cinema. You could actually make a drinking game out of all the long jumps in this movie. At least four times characters jump these impossibly long distances and find themselves to be perfectly unscathed. But as it turns out the tank scene is only a pre-finale, and for the piece de resistance we get an airplane tarmac chase, (shot on the same 300 mile long runway as Argo), that must be seen to be believed. It’s just off the wall and I want to meet the person who came up with it so I can put him under citizen’s arrest until the police arrive to take him away. Cars explode out of the cockpits of airplanes, cars are blown around like paper by the jets, (more realistic than Argo, for the record), people are shredded in the jets, and Gina Carano is shot with a hook gatling gun and blown out of the airplane. (That’s another thing: this movie is so fucking violent for a PG-13! It’s amazing this got made!) I haven’t even touched on the miraculous survival of three characters in this scene, or the preposterous…never mind, just go and watch it for yourself. This movie is in a constant competition of one-upping itself. “Remember that crazy shit we did with the tank literally just two minutes ago? OK, now we’re gonna top that…with a fucking airplane.” It’s insanity, but wonderful, beautifully orchestrated insanity without so much as a pinch of noticeable CGI, and 100% real car stunts. It’s not always a home run, and there’s about 40 minutes in the middle where nothing is happening and the movie is just treading it’s wheels laying pipe for future installments, and I was seriously bored. But the action sequences are so incredible that I left the theater feeling exhilarated, not exhausted like most action movies leave me. And if there was any doubt that I wouldn’t return for future installments, the post-credits scene insured that I’d be there opening day. Seriously guys, there’s one of the most surprising, awesome cameos of all time at the very end and it got me so fucking excited for the next movie. I’m not even a fan of the series, and I can’t wait to see the next one! Well, actually, maybe that means I am a fan of the series. This one ends with all the criminals sitting around a table about to eat a big BBQ dinner (cuz they’re just normal guys, at the end of the day, right guys?) and Tyrese is saying grace, “Bless those we lost along the way…” Oh, you mean like all those people you flattened with that tank? OK, just wondering. And is it really a smart idea for a bunch of highly wanted criminals to constantly be together at all times? You know what, forget it. Just go along for the ride.

I can’t suppress my manly instincts. This is cool.

* * 1/2

Fast & Furious 6

Directed by Justin Lin.

Written by Chris Morgan.

Cast: Vin Diesel, Paul Walker

Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action and mayhem throughout, some sexuality, and language.

130 minutes.