Fast Month - Fast and Furious 6

Fast and Furious 6 showed the success of Fast 5 was not an accident, making $788m at the box office, with a budget of $160m; it wasn’t quite as big a critical hit, though it still holds a respectable 69% on Rotten Tomatoes, with an average 6.2/10 with an IMDb rating of 7.1. But is it on the right path, or were the peaks reached in the last movie? Let’s take a look

All our respective heroes are off in hiding, but when new boring villain Owen Shaw and his team of fast racers, including a revived and memory-less Letty begin hijacking military convoys, Hobbs turns to the one team he knows can stop them… and when they say no, he turns to Dom Toretto and his crew. Tej, Roman, Brian, Han and Gisele are up against a foe slightly smarter than the usual ones.

OK, so I think the one thing I can say is the treatment of women in this one in particular is pretty bad. Fast and Furious has always been somewhat of a sausage-fest. Mia is left at home with the blond chick from the last movie and only shows up at the end in need of rescue. Letty, I suppose is the best written character but she’s still written as rescue-bait to get our heroes into action. The only other woman in this has little character depth and ends up being a traitor for reasons I don’t really know.

And yes, more retcons, this movie has comic book logic all over it. So Letty wasn’t killed in Fast and Furious, she was merely near the car when it explodes and was sent flying, the bump on her head gave her amnesia and Shaw took her in for reasons of erm… romance?

I guess they were setting up Shaw’s crew to kinda be a mirror to Dom’s crew, the problem is the people have so little depth to the that the comparisons all fall kinda flat, aside from Shaw and Letty I couldn’t tell you for a minute who any of the other guys are or what their main contribution was to the scheme aside from maybe the blond muscle guy.

But we still get our lighthearted and funny interactions between our lead characters and a few more dramatic moments, particularly with Brian as he untangles this mess and deals with the guilt. But it’s also nice he uses his experience from the other side to uncover particular details.

There is only street race in the entire movie, and Fast and Furious is basically an action franchise with cars and scantily clad women now. The race itself is there for Letty and Dom to show off how good they are and rekindle old flames. I’ll give them credit that they don’t have Letty magically regain her memory at the end. Cliché avoided.

The movie does still have good action, in this movie they face off against a tank and a plane, and of course they cause much damage during the whole film. Of course it doesn’t help that the villains don’t fire the gun on the tank until the very last minute, by which time it’s too late. The theme of family is a big one in this, particularly with Brian as he now has a child, which makes for some cute interactions for Brian and Dom. I also like that Mia doesn’t hesitate to allow Brian on the mission, she loves both of him and Dom and thinks they’re safer together.

Hobbs does not have much to do in this movie, since he’s no longer chasing Dom, there’s not much in terms of subplots here. He’s the Nick Fury of the movie, bringing the team together but ultimately contributing little to driving action, settling instead for beating people up, which is fine, The Rock does have the experience for that. I wonder if this is where the start of the Vin Diesel/The Rock feud began in this franchise, since I don’t think it was prevalent in the last one.

Furious 6 is a decent action movie with funny and likeable characters and good stunt-driving and action. It lacks in a decent villain but with the oncoming storm of Jason Statham, will that change with Furious 7? Find out next time

Rating 70/100