Movie Review: Fast & Furious 6 (2013)

Despite my evergreen enthusiasm for trashy action movies, this is my first encounter with the Fast & Furious films. I more or less managed to ignore them for the last 12 years: but mid-afternoon boredom, coupled with a few decent reviews and a respectable aggregate score on Rotten Tomatoes, prompted me to give this one a chance. And, for the most part, I was glad I did.

One of the more plausible sequences, for real.

As a rule, franchises don't mature easily. Except for James Bond, most either limp into their toddler years and/or slowly embrace the starless and cash-strapped straight-to-video market. Yet here we are with Fast & Furious 6: more expensive and star-studded than ever despite being old enough to start kindergarten. To its credit, this is one series where prior knowledge of the previous movies is practically unnecessary. In fact, it may actually be beneficial. Just know that Vin Diesel plays a former ex-con street racer done good, a regular Robin Hood with hydraulics, and his merry band of thieves includes buddies like white boi Paul Walker, Tyrese, Ludacris, Sung Kang, Michelle Rodriguez, and Jordana Brewster. In their last adventure, our gang toppled a capitalist's empire and made off with the loot, scattering across the globe to enjoy the good life. Dwayne Johnson plays a super buff military man in need of Diesel's assistance: turns out one of the crew has seemingly returned from the dead to work for a smuggler, and for some reason INTERPOL desperately needs the help of these street racers and import fanatics to take him down. They agree in exchange for amnesty and full pardons, naturally.

Thankfully, there's little time wasted in developing the story beyond that. Johnson shows up in the first 10 minutes, gives the group their marching orders, and then off they go into a world of CGI-fueled chases and car hops. For the first hour of the film, I was very pleased with this breakneck pace. Extended, expertly planned, gravity-defying driving sequences make the time fly right by, even though the artificiality of the special effects is sometimes too transparent. They are bracketed by necessarily exposition-laden scenes that at least have the good taste to be funny, and even if it's mostly childish humor (a recurring bit centers on the size of Tyrese's forehead), it's a welcome thing indeed to see a movie so aware of its stupidity and willing to exploit it. Speaking of which, there are some chase sequences in here that should be kept forever in the annals of excessive movie stupidity, particularly the entertaining tank heist near the end that features more than a single instance of Superman-style carjacking, a thoroughly impractical method that is intellectually and kinesthetically pleasing. Unfortunately, a tepid, hammy Act II really slows the pace down with plot, of all things, but once that's out of the way, it's right back to cars fighting much bigger vehicles in all kinds of wacky, unexpected situations. For summer popcorn, this is a good time.