The Gangs All Here: What is this, a table? I cant drive a table!
  • The Gang's All Here: "What is this, a table? I can't drive a table!"

I don't think the financial success of the Fast & Furious franchise is entirely attributable to fast cars and cheap thrills. I think a great deal of the movie's appeal at the multiplex comes from the fact that it's the only major summer movie franchise that features a truly multicultural cast. Not only that, these movies are totally blasé about the fact that they star a multicultural cast; nobody is a token character, none of the characters spend time dwelling on their differences. These are highly unrealistic movies—about which more soon—but the cast may be the most realistic set of faces you'll see in a blockbuster all year, if you live in a major American city. Part of the appeal of a Fast & Furious movie, I think, comes from that recognition.

Which is good, because even the most unrealistic movie needs to have some sort of a base of realism on which it can build. And Fast & Furious 6 is one of the most unrealistic movies you'll see this summer. Director Justin Lin, now on his fourth Fast & Furious film, has taken a fairly unassuming street-racing series and made each movie crazier and crazier until finally, with what might be his final entry in the franchise, he has given birth to a whole new genre: Car-fu. Using absolutely no 3D and plenty of what appear to be practical effects (with lots of CGI tossed in for good measure), Lin has become the John Woo of the demolition derby, tossing what feels like a good-sized mall parking lot full of cars around his sets until it becomes a kind of surrealistic ballet. You've got cars crushed by debris. You've got cars skidding daintily on their bumpers, perpendicular to the ground. You've got cars lashed to each other, flying through the air. They pirouette, they dance, they dive, they leap. They fold like origami, they roar, they butt into each other like rivals during mating season.

And the automotive violence rubs off on Fast & Furious 6's human cast, too. When The Rock, as a law enforcement officer named Luke Hobbs, tosses a bad guy around a Moscow interrogation room, it's not a body doing violence to a body. It's one of Lin's automotive crashes, dolled up in human form. Hobbs sends the crook sailing through the air into ceilings and floors and walls, only to pick him up and chuck him again, until he becomes injured and so turns into some sort of a simpering, whining...pedestrian, begging for mercy. And Vin Diesel's Dominic Toretto only has one signature move: The flying head butt. Toretto leaps at his target with his whole body, bringing his gigantic, gleaming dome down square on the poor sap with a sickening bludgeoning sound effect. It's not so much a physical assault as it is a hit & run.

The plot—what little there is—calls back to just about every Fast & Furious movie that came before, and so it's a mess to explain.

Hobbs, on the trail of some sort of a criminal mastermind named Shaw (Luke Evans, good enough) recruits Toretto and his friends (basically the same crew that was assembled for Fast Five's big heist, including Paul Walker, Tyrese Gibson, Ludacris, Sung Kang, and Elsa Pataky) with the promise of universal pardons for all the sins they've committed in the past movies. And he dangles the possibility of a reunion, too: Toretto's beloved girlfriend Letty (Michelle Rodriguez), who seemingly died back in the fourth F&F movie, is alive and working for Shaw. Yeah, it's a convoluted soap opera. But you don't have to have seen the previous movies to get the gist of what's going on, and once all the exposition is over and done with, none of it really matters, anyway.

The action is what counts, and Lin does some excellent composition work in the car chase scenes. Cars speed, lunge, and careen into each other. Lin gives us a sense of place and he builds a natural sense of drama into these scenes. Vehicles range from normal cars to street racers to shovel-headed dune buggies to very fast tanks to SUVs to gigantic planes, and each vehicle has its own personality and capabilities. You always know who's in which car, and what they're trying to do with their car, and who's trying to stop them. That's no easy feat, and Lin pulls it off and makes it look easy as he does it. He also leavens each action scene with at least one bit of physics-defying stunt work that leaves audiences laughing with disbelief. (At one point, a car windshield is portrayed as something that can successfully and comfortably break an out-of-control fall.) To Lin's credit, the laughter seems to be with him, rather than at him, which means that those stunts work, somehow. It must be talent, because nobody is that lucky.

But don't get me wrong. This isn't a departure from the series, or even an especially good movie. The dialogue is awful. The plot basically eye-rolls itself to death in parts, and the story is unnecessarily paunchy in the middle. While the action sequences are well-put-together, other parts of the movie are lazy and shoddily assembled. (The Rock's goatee keeps disappearing and reappearing in scenes that are no more than a few hours apart in the story's timeline.)

But goddamnit, I liked this movie. I like that while it certainly doesn't try to be smart, it never stops trying to entertain the pants off its audience. I like that the movie ends in such a way that it serves as a satisfying conclusion to both the second trilogy of F&F movies and to the whole franchise in general. I like Vin Diesel's gravelly delivery, when it comes alongside his little twisted, self-aware smile. I like that The Rock gets called the Hulk, Captain America, and Thor by three different characters in the film, making him a one-man version of the Avengers. I like that the script hints at a concept for a Fast & Furious 7 that has me genuinely excited. I like that Fast & Furious 6 desperately wants me to leave the theater feeling like I saw a spectacle. For a guilty-pleasure popcorn movie, I think that's a pretty okay deal.