Fast & Furious 6

After the events in the first five Fast & Furious outings - neatly summed up during the movie's opening titles - most of the gang have gone their own way to spend their cash and stay away from the various parties that would still like to cart them back to jail. However when a convoy is attacked in the middle of Moscow, it becomes clear that a very polished, vehicle-savvy crew are collecting software for what amounts to a new EMP-device that could fry a whole city's electronics. Bestriding the scene like he's just arm-wrestled the whole of the KGB and found it wanting, Dwayne Johnson's Hobbs (think Nick Fury on steroids) realises that the only people able to track and defeat the villains are his own nemeses Dom Toretto (Vin Diesel), Brian O'Conner (Paul Walker) and co.  Needless to say, the retired Toretto and new father O'Conner arent interested until Hobbs reveals recent photographs that seem to indicate that their late, lamented comrade Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) is alive and well and working for the bad guys. Hobbs wants the EMP components, the team want Letty and if they can defeat the bad guys, Hobbs promoses that everyone on the 'Furious' team will get compelte pardons.  As the team come back together and head to London, what could possibly go wrong?  

It turns out, almost everything - but nothing that can't be cured by a lot of fancy-driving, collateral damage of roadways, high-flying stunts and some hand-to-hand combat while dodging bullets. Yes, anyone going into the film series must know, by now, what to expect. This is not going to be Shakespeare, though the Bard might have well have come up with some choice words about the curves of the cars, the fast women and the furiously furrowed brows that adorn the antics. Audiences do not come into the cinema for a Fast & Furious chapter wanting anything other than the outrageous and the entertaining and what follows duly defies logic and gravity in equal measure. At key points the audeince will whoop, cheer, laugh and roll their eyes and a few of the stunts will get genuine applause as the popcorn falls from the edge of the punters' seats. Audacity has never been so hyped. 

The suspension of disbelief might as well be hung high off any of the London landmarks that adorn the backdrop of the film. Cars speed through the capital's street mostly unencumbered by the likes of gridlock traffic, jaywalking pedestrians or closed streets that would be staples of the real world. Indeed, when all is said and done this is a movie built for the international crowd, not the UK box-office.... Britons may simply not buy the de rigeur action or outmatched, disposable cops we'd accept in downtown LA or uptown New York on our own streets.... it's a somewhat uncomfortable transplant  because we simply don't have weekly blinged-out drag-racing around Piccadilly Circus - but for all the lip-service to the backdrop, this is a film that could happily be playing fast and furious in ANY photofit location. It's a matter of never mind the backdrop, feel the curves. Women dance, cars speed by, a Spanish highway becomes littered with crushed  commuters....of course, pause even for a second at the red-lights of logic and Fast & Furious is also clearly dumb and dubious but unapologetically so.

Diesel and Walker have long since mastered their macho derring-do and realised they simply need to cash theh paycheck. This isn't a film that stretches either's acting talent, but they do get to deliver some arch dialogue proving they can fake everything including sincerity. They speed, fly or run from one location to another, throw some punches and look meaningfully into the melancholy distance and wonder why people can't just leave them alone. Dwayne Johnson, rapidly gaining the kind of comic-book propotioned physique that suggests he could bench-press the Incredible Hulk, strides through every scene barking orders as if he just walked off the recent GI Joe set, which may well have been the case. 

Women fair less well in this outing.  They shimmer, strut and there's equal-opportunistic kicking of butt in some well-choreographed fisticuffs (Gina Carano as Hobbs' second-in-command, once again demonstrates her MMA abilities) , but their characters are woefully underwritten and subservient to the men.  "No, please feel free to abandon me and child to go looking for your best buddy's dead girlfriend, I totally understand you need to do that after saying you were out of that dangerous life..." muses Jordana Brewster's new mum Mia barely missing a beat; "I guess that's just the way it goes...it's what I'd do if my other half miraculously came back from the dead..." shrugs Elsa Pataky's Elena understandingly when Vin's Toretto abandons her post-coitus to go search for Letty. Even Rodriguez herself, as the pivot point of the outing, plays Letty an amnesiac who's apparently forgotten all the men in her life pre-crash but retains absolute clarity on mechanics and gear-sticks. 

Yes, it's amazing that so many cars can avoid so many plot-holes on the track ahead, but it's a tad unfair to be so fickle about a film that does for Grand Prix what The Expendables does for mercenaries and with much the same regard for filming the legend. While films such as A Good Day to Die Hard felt achingly old, this is a film that at least celebrates the formula in the Formula 1 and positively winks at the camera while doing so. If GI Joe is the big-screen version of the gung-ho army toy, then Fast & Furious has the equal depth of a Scaletrix set turned up to 11, with the same lack of consequence/casualties found in an A-Team outing as sponsored by Corona. The secret is merely to buckle up and hope the insurance premiums are up to date. Enagae popcorn and put your pedal to the metal...

The film, directed with kinetic energy by Justin Lin, is largely critic-proof and just became Universal's biggest ever-opening in the US. That means a seventh film is a certainty... and all that been said, the pre-end-credits epilogue (yes, PRE-end-credits... no dawdling around here!) introduces us to another player for that inevitable seventh outing that will have action-fans positively quivering at the possibilities.  Yes, for all the fact the gas-gauge is running on fumes when it comes to originality and the current film's trailer already highlighted the best bits, there still seems to be plenty of track left for roadkill.

8/10

Fast and Furious 6 - distributed by Universal - is out now.