Fast and Furious 6 Review

When we dream, it would appear that are whole sections of our brain that we just can't call upon. For example, have you ever noticed how easy it is to transition from one place to another in a dream? One minute you're in a train carriage, the next you're in a rain forest; and yet your mind calmly accepts this leap of location without so much as asking 'erm, did that just make sense?'. There is probably a proper scientific term for this, but I like to refer to it as dreamlike naivety. And if you're wondering why it is that I'm rambling on about the way dreams work when you were expecting me to be reviewing Fast and Furious 6, well it's because - in my humble opinion - Fast and Furious 6 is a movie best watched while in a state of dreamlike naivety...

Fast and Furious 6 follows on directly from the events of Fast Five (2011), during which the team successful separated a drug lord from his $100 million, and sees the various members of the crew enjoying a life of luxury and a life without crime. Now, of course, if things were to continue in this vein for the rest of the movie then it would be a pretty tedious movie but they don't because Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) is soon tracked down by Agent Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) who has a photo that suggests that Dom's former girlfriend, Letty (Michelle Rodriguez), is not as dead as she appeared to be in Fast and Furious (2009) and is actually alive and working for an ex-special forces soldier by the name of Owen Shaw (Luke Evans). It's enough to convince Dom to reform the team and they all head to London to try to stop Shaw from stealing a complicated set of ingredients he needs to put together some mcguffin or another (that always stays fairly vague, even when it's directly explained). And from then on it's a veritable feast of stunt driving, wise cracking, gun fighting, and ass kicking that not only defies belief but also pretty much all known laws of physics...

...and I liked it.

I will freely admit, this is not the kind of movie you should go and see if you pick at the contrivances and wince at the merest hint of what might possibly be a tiny plot hole. This is a movie that is basically a set of plot holes stitched together in a smorgasbord of insane action. It's a roller coaster of a movie that assails you with scenes which can only truly be enjoyed if you've set your brain to dreamlike naivety mode and can just watch them unfurl across the screen in wave after wave of automotive abandon. Forget that the villain's plan makes little or no sense, forget that the team seems to have gone from a bunch of street racers to a team that can challenge Ethan Hunt and the gang, forget that cars are not indestructible and that rolling one several times will likely result in more than a few bruises, forget that the decisions made by the team (and the villain) are exceptionally bad throughout much of the movie . Forget ALL that.

If you can do that, you can really enjoy it for what it is. If you can't you're going to hate this more than I hated Prometheus (which is to say, an awful damn lot). Thankfully, I had no problem switching my brain to autopilot and just enjoying the sheer ridiculousness of it all. I was going to give this a seven out of ten but the ending was surely worth an extra point on its own (you'll see what I mean if you go watch it). Fast and Furious 6 is like a supercharged muscle car - all horsepower, nitrous-oxide, and gleaming chrome - a product of pure brawn and not too much brain. But fortunately, a bit of dreamlike naivety can sometimes be just what one wants...

Rating:  8 out of 10