Movie Breakdown: Fast And Furious 6 (Noah)
People are doing traditional-style reviews all over the web, so we decided to try something different. In each “breakdown” we’ll take a look at what a film’s marketing lead us to believe, how the movie actually played, and then what we learned from it all. Read on!
The Impression:
I fucking loved Fast Five. From the first train heist to the a bunch of cars dragging a safe down the street, the movie popped and I was smitten. If Justin Lin just recorded that film on to a bunch of VHS tapes and that’s what I saw in the cinema this evening, I’d probably be happy. Instead I can look forward to tanks and airplanes and fast cars that make other fast cars explode. Giggle!
The Reality:
Yup, awesome. Okay sure, the film drags in the middle, while Justin Lin is cutting a machete path of exposition so he can set up the last 40 minutes as one enormous action sequence. And yes, the dialogue is stilted “ghetto tough-guy” speech that falls flat almost every time Tyrese talks (well it fell flat to my ears, the audience I was lucky enough to be squished in to laughed at every line and jumped at every big surprise). And yes Michelle Rodriguez is no longer a successful actor for good reason. And yes, and yes, and yes … and if you really wanted to you could sit here and pick apart all the different parts of Fast And Furious 6 that don’t work whatsoever and the movie will collapse with your infernal meddling. Or you can do what I did tonight, which is sit down, possibly drunk, and open your mind to the fucking 6th installment in a series that has starred Paul Walker (the poor, stupid man’s Matthew McConaughey) and Vin Diesel (the poor man’s cinder block) for almost 15 years that has, somehow beyond all expectations, gotten bigger and better with every new twist and turn. Justin Lin has managed to take a pretty podunk little action franchise and turned it into a swirling, twirling world of car-thieves, hulking cops, familial bad guys, and international bandits. There were characters in this film from other Fast And Furious films that I had no idea even existed, but you could feel that Lin was pulling from his world, doubling back to thicken up what he’d already created. An action franchise actually remembering what came before? Fucking novel! But seriously, aside from all the story work and the character building and so on and so forth this is a movie about cars exploding and driving fast and it delivers in spades. Every crash in this film feels like it’s happening in your lap and every one involves four other cars and a building. This is, as Ludacris so aptly says in the film, “vehicular warfare” and it’s amazing.
The Lesson:
If you are paying to see the sixth film in the Fast And Furious franchise and you don’t know what you’re getting in to … you are dumb.
