Justin Lin’s Fast Five took the Fast & Furious franchise to another level. It was the best film since the original and it also introduced The Rock, aka Dwayne Johnson, into the mix, allowing Vin Diesel to square up against the big man for a showdown that led to one of the most exciting and explosive endings to an all out action heist movie in quite some time. The follow-up to that film, the aptly titled Fast and Furious 6, takes what we love from every Fast and Furious movie and mashes it all into one mega film that, like the tag line says, proves all roads lead to this.
In Fast and the Furious 6, Luke Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) has been tracking down and trying to capture a group of highly sophisticated criminals led by the intelligent Owen Shaw (Luke Evans). When all his options are exhausted, Hobbs turns to the now retired Dom Toretto (Vin Diesel) to ask for help in stopping Shaw and his doppelganger Toretto crew from completing his mission. In exchange for the criminals to come out of retirement and help capture Shaw, Hobbs promises to reunite his family and deliver the once thought dead Letty (Michell Rodriguez) back to Dom while also granting his entire crew full pardons. After some comical debating, the group decides to move forward and help Hobbs, and his new partner Riley (Gina Carano), being the action packed manhunt for Shaw.
As briefly mentioned earlier, Fast and Furious 6 take everything we the fans love about this franchise and throws it all into one movie for something we never thought could be possible. As the film progresses deeper into its 130 min. awesome duration, you can forget about the laws of physics, you can forget that most of the team doesn’t really have much weapons training and don’t even think about how bad some of the dialogue is, particularly at the end which nearly ruins the movie, all you need to do is keep your eyes on the screen, sit back and enjoy the high octane, insane ride that Justin Lin takes us on.
Many people were worried that this wasn’t going to be a true Fast and Furious, movie meaning that it wouldn’t have any drag racing. It would be the gang doing something that they normally don’t do, helping out the law, and simply using some cars, and now weapons, to chase the enemy down. My dear FF fans, fear not, this movie is everything you could ever want and so much more. Fast and Furious 6 aims to blow your action loving load and it is amazing how it does so. When we get our first action scene with Toretto’s crew reunited, they nearly capture Owen Shaw’s highly skilled and prepared team on the first go around, the reason it doesn’t work out so well is that Shaw’s team has two vehicles I call the car-flipper race car that, well, can flip cars coming towards them. This 10 minute chase scene is pretty awesome and only just sets the stage for what’s to come. Each action scene that follows, which always starts out with a beautiful wide shot of the landscape to give you an idea of the scope of the scene, gets bigger and bigger, more explosive and more dangerous, and to a level of epicness that you would never expect if the trailer didn’t give you a taste of what was to come. If you loved the climactic bank heist scene at the end of Fast Five, then get ready because you ain’t seen nothing yet.
Ever since Justin Lin took over as director for the franchise wi
th Tokyo Drift, Lin, and just as importantly his writer Chris Morgan, have developed a story that continues throughout the following films rather than being one-off adventures. Cool characters are slowly added to the mix, each given their chance to shine and grow, much like The Avengers, continually having a certain impact on the next film that way when the time comes for the gang to come together it actually makes some sort of sense. It’s this continuity that’s really helped the franchise progressively get stronger under his leadership, but it’s the action spectacle that it attaches itself to that really elevated the franchise, and this specific film, to the blockbuster status it has attained.
Fast and Furious 6 may go absurdly beyond what we would consider to be realistic but with the return of almost every character from the preceding films (Paul Walker, Sung Kang, Elsa Pataky, Ludacris, and Tyrese Gibson) and tough new ones introduced to the mix, we are granted nearly the full range action film entertainment, which does include a few plot twists! From all the comical quips from the supporting cast that we’ve come to know and love, brutal close combat fights with Joe Taslim (The Raid: Redemption) and Co., shootouts with big guns, little downtime between the action, and chase sequences that are so badass you have to see to believe them, Fast and Furious 6 does more than meet expectations, it surpasses them on every level and gives you the balls-to-the-wall action movie you’ve been craving for.
Rating: A Fast and Furious movie that takes everything you’ve ever known to the next level and giving you the action spectacle you’ve always wanted (8/10)
P.S. Be sure to stay a few minutes into the credits for a great scene that’ll get you amped for the next film
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