The Fast & the Furious franchise started on the right note – it ‘used to be’ about fast cars, pretty babes, a semblance of a story line, decent humor and some more than decent action. Till then, it all seemed to fit. Then the franchise seemingly took the American Pie route – churning out sequel on sequel without much thought and you had F&F 3, 4 and in my opinion 5 as well, making a pretty sad representation of the franchise itself. Rather than focusing on burning the rubber and NO2 boosters, thereby making a style statement with its own unique stamp, the franchise tried to become emotional, get us to connect with the central characters and defy Newton and the general laws of physics – that, is when things started becoming awry
As you start this latest installment of Fast & Furious 6, there is some hope. Sure, all that talk of family and the forced emotional connect is there, but the action doesn’t seem forced and a few sequences are intelligently thought through and shot to a point of precision, as yet unseen beyond a point in the franchise. But that hope soon bites the dust. The film then drops several notches down to hurriedly decided and delivered story development and impossible situations. There is many an occasion wherein the action just doesn’t make sense and you can see gaping plot holes in the way it develops
Unfortunately, the second half of the movie only compounds matters and now the action itself is, intentionally or unintentionally, impossible to follow. Only when you see an enemy vehicle suddenly flying off, do you get confirmation that the stunt worked. What the stunt was and how it was engineered in the first place, the director or rather the editor feel you are better off not knowing. One impossible stunt follows another and at 2 hours and 15 minutes, the spray of bullets, whir of engines and drone of helicopters becomes a bit much. There is the rare occasion where the spotlight actually shifts back to the ‘racing’ part of it, wherein you get treated to awesome visuals which you can easily follow and you wish there was more of this
Much respite is offered by the humorous moments in the film mainly provided by the characters of Roman and Han and they are welcome break from all the over-focus on the action. Meanwhile, Vin Diesel as Dom, has the all too familiar self assured look throughout the movie – the only trouble is that in this installment he doesn’t have the dialogues to back him up. Paul Walker as Brian maintains pretty much the same avatar as the previous few movies and does a decent job.
Sit through the credits and you’ll even get a fleeting glimpse of what you can expect in the 7th installment (yes, I am unhappy to confirm this but we must face facts). If you can somehow close yourself to any basic laws of science, disregard Newton and allow for a wafer thin plot to run, just so you can witness some explosive action then Fast & Furious 6 may have served up just the offering for you. For the most part however, it doesn’t make me very keen to watch the 7th
Well this was expected, makers of Fast and the Furious series always made the sequels aiming at improvement of action scene and not the story and these movies look like a collection of different action scenes which look good on screen. Its clear from your review that this movie is no different its a typical popcorn entertainment like other movies of this series.
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