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With 2011’s Fast Five, the Fast & Furious franchise decided to head in a new direction, using fast cars to pull off thrilling, Ocean’s Eleven-style heists. The result was entertaining enough to make the thought of a sixth film almost bearable—but the follow-up takes a formula that worked and shifts it into overdrive.
After pulling off their heist in Rio, fugitives Dom (Vin Diesel) and Brian (Paul Walker) have settled in Spain. Brian and his wife, Mia (Jordana Brewster), are still adjusting to life with their infant son when Dom gets a visit from Agent Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson), asking for help.
A crew led by Owen Shaw (Luke Evans) is building a tech bomb that could be worth billions to the highest bidder, and Hobbs wants Dom to get the gang back together to stop them. In exchange, they’ll be granted full pardons, allowing them to return home to the States. It’ll also bring Dom closer to Letty (Michelle Rodriguez), the love he believed to be dead, who’s now working with Shaw.
In many ways, Fast & Furious 6 is just what you’d expect from the sixth film in the street-racing franchise. It’s fast and flashy, with plenty of hot cars, tough chicks, high-speed chases, and explosions. The writing, meanwhile, is absolutely ridiculous. The dialogue often feels painfully awkward, with too many cringe-worthy one-liners—and it’s all presented with what feels like high school theater-level delivery. Granted, there are a few bright spots in the cheesiness—like Tyrese Gibson and Ludacris, who give the film its [intentional] comic relief—but the rest of the cast tends to get bogged down by clunky conversations and overcooked melodrama.
Had director Justin Lin stuck to the usual formula, Fast & Furious 6 could have been another action-packed guilty pleasure. Instead, he apparently felt the need to give the sixth installment more twists, more suspense, and more drama than ever before. In the process, he took the movie to eye-rolling extremes. Some of the action sequences go so far beyond plausibility that they’re head-shakingly distracting. The twists are completely irrelevant. And the drawn-out drama—especially the long heart-to-hearts between Dom and Letty (who, incidentally, is suffering from an all-too-convenient case of amnesia)—makes the pacing drag.
In the 12 years since The Fast and the Furious first hit theaters, it seems as though the filmmakers have forgotten what made the movies fun in the first place. Instead of focusing on the fast cars to produce more brainless entertainment, the sixth film in the franchise takes itself way too seriously, resulting in an uncomfortably idiotic action movie that thinks it’s a whole lot smarter than it really is.
Listen to the review on Reel Discovery:
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