Fast and Furious 6 Review

I wanted to see this because I like half of the Fast and Furious movies and I was really interested to see how they would do elaborate car chases through the narrow, crowded streets of London.  As it turns out, the best way to solve that problem is to just not do much driving in London.  Right from the get go, this movie is largely a disappointment.  Yes, it has a relatively flimsy story but so do all of the other films in the franchise.  Nobody goes to see these for the story.  We go to see these movies to increase our adrenaline output through watching fast cars and things getting destroyed.  But, when you don't have much of that, the story is all you have to fall back on and that's where this franchise can become boring.

For this one, they tried to go too far with a ridiculous "doppelganger" gimmick and allegedly clever dialogue.  I'm guessing this was an attempt to ramp up the on screen dynamic between Dwayne Johnson and Vin Diesel that was good in the last film.  However, no matter how well those two can work together, it will all fall apart when the writing relies too much on moronic metaphors and allegedly clever witticisms.  And then having a lot of those lines delivered by Ludacris and Tyrese Gibson is guaranteeing an eye-rolling audience.  This is made even worse by having a flimsy plot that they start and then ignore for almost two hours.  I wouldn't mind if they had filled a lot of that two hours with something happening on the screen.  But this one just goes nowhere.

That being said, when there is action, it is decent.  There are a few spots where they leap over the boundaries of realism (jumping out of cars, comically long runways, etc.) but it's a shallow action franchise and I'm usually willing to let reality slip somewhat for that.  The problem is that the action sequences are too few and far between (especially for a 2.25 hour movie) which makes you notice the numerous plot holes , shake your head, and become bored.

Don't see it.  I'm hoping 7 is better and I would just recommend you read a synopsis to get caught up before going to see the next one.  It can be done.  Right before the movie started Steph asked me, "so what happened between the first one and this that I need to know?"  And she wasn't confused at all.