What exactly is our fascination with the Fast and Furious franchise that makes the ridiculous nature of it all acceptable where in any other film we would just as soon walk out of the theater before enduring another high flying feat of impossible derring-do? Up until the fourth film in the franchise (2009’s Fast & Furious) there were minor levels of absurd behavior taking place, but after Tokyo Drift each film has found a way to one-up the last, leading us to Fast & Furious 6 where not even a tank can discourage our band of criminals who find themselves in London, helping the feds this time around in exchange for full pardons and a clean slate.
I had a hard time accepting the over-the-top action in Fast Five, not entirely impressed with the massive safe-stealing set piece at the film’s conclusion, but I think it prepared me for what Fast 6 had to offer, which is to say more of the same and then some.
Whether people are jumping out of planes or off bridges onto moving vehicles, catapulting from one side of a bridge to another, grabbing someone in mid-air and safely landing on the hood of a car or laughing off a gunshot wound to the chest as if they were simply stung by a mosquito, Fast and Furious 6 offers every possible scenario typically found in lesser budgeted, direct-to-video features. The difference being, this isn’t a lesser-budgeted film ($160 million in fact) and while the cast isn’t a bunch of A-listers, names like Dwayne Johnson and Vin Diesel attract a certain legion of followers. And when stars like this are placed inside a well-known franchise that has managed to keep its entire cast together it’s a recipe for success as long as each movie manages to deliver something the last didn’t while also remaining true to the characters we’ve come to know.
In fact, when it comes to character, you could argue the success of Fast 6 was all but guaranteed in the closing moments of Fast Five when the audience was teased with a picture of Michelle Rodriguez whose Letty character was supposed to have been killed in the fourth film. Her return alone ensures a curiosity factor many will find impossible to resist and then when the trailers promote a car driving out of the nose of a plane as it’s exploding and crashing down to the tarmac is there much left to do but start counting the dollars?
This isn’t to completely dismiss Fast 6 as some sort of a freak show, even though it is the Frankenstein monster of B-list talent once you get beyond Johnson’s current stranglehold on the box office. In fact, director Justin Lin shows some real action film talent, particularly in the film’s batshit insane finale.
There must be about eight different fights taking place over the course of the film’s final 15 minutes, all aboard (or near) a giant cargo plane as it races down the runway. Cars are attached to this thing, people are fighting inside the cargo bay, people are fighting inside the cars swinging from the wing, they’re driving in and out, guns are being fired and the pilots in the cockpit won’t give up trying to get it off the ground. Putting the scene together in any kind of understandable fashion is a feat unto itself. Of course, kudos also belong to Lin’s trio of editors — Greg D’Auria, Kelly Matsumoto and Christian Wagner — whose control board must have been drenched in sweat by the time they finished putting each action sequence together.
Beyond the action, the cast, the love for the franchise, fast cars, girls in tiny outfits and the return of Letty, the one thing that keeps us coming back to this franchise even if we weren’t all that impressed with a couple of the film’s before it is the film’s ability to laugh at itself. This is a franchise that not only gives the audience the impression they’re along for the ride, it feels as if we are all in on each and every character quirk and insane bit of unreality.
Whether it’s Tyrese Gibson as Roman searching for change for the vending machine, Johnson as Hobbs saying, “España”, Ludacris’ phone reading “Samoan Thor” when Hobbs calls or Diesel as Dom brooding in the corner as he waits for Brian (Paul Walker), these are the characters we’ve come to know over the past 12 years. They may be meatheads and the acting may be awful, they’re our meatheads and we recognize these characters as people in some weird way.
The theme of the franchise is boiled down to family and at this point we feel as if we are part of the Fast and Furious family and for two hours and ten minutes we get to sit back as they save the world in ways that make them more myth than man.
