Fast & Furious 6 Review: High Octane, Low IQ

If you watched the trailer you know the story: Dom and company get together once again to stop a bad guy named Shaw and get Letty back. People fight, fire guns, crash cars, a tank and a plane.

Let’s start with the good stuff before moving to the “character’s” issue. The action set pieces are big, spectacular and creative. The “flip car” is a cool bat-mobile-style vehicle. Scenes like the one unleashing a tank on a freeway or bringing down that plane look fantastic. There aren’t many hand to hand fight sequences but the ones we saw are well choreographed and intense, specially those with Gina Carano facing Michelle Rodriguez.

Cutting and pasting just these action sequences together would create a 40 minutes long audiovisual punch. The problem is that there is another hour to go through. When machines aren’t running and fists and bullets aren’t flying things get bad. The connective tissue is full of nonsense, of poorly written dialogues, underdeveloped characters, unfunny jokes, cliches, melodrama, and bad acting.

I can hear some people screaming “It isn’t high art. It’s a Summer movie!”. That is not an excuse for laziness, lack of talent, excess of ego or whatever the reasons are behind the creation of a bad cinematic product. That judgment would also mean putting popcorn classics like Jurassic Park and The Avengers in the same bag of fiascos like Jonah Hex and Cowboys vs. Aliens.

Many blockbusters are good at disguising its own shortcomings by keeping things dynamic. Fast & Furious feels more like a boxing match than a chase. Both sides meet and go back to their corners again and again.

In one scene where a hundred policemen are surrounding a structure occupied only by the villain, none of them walks in to apprehend him. Then we see the bad guys attacking the good guys, but just when they had the chance to kill them, they decide to better run off so now the good guys can chase them. One of the two main characters risks his freedom and family wellbeing by returning to LA, while the other one refuses to grab Letty and kill Shaw when he could clearly do it.

But these are just to prepare us for the most ridiculous development of them all. Close to the end we get to witness almost a reenactment of that scene in The Naked Gun 33 1/3 when Frank Drebin hands the bomb to the villain and the auditorium reacts in disbelief . The only difference is that they play it with a straight face. Tyrese Gibson’s Roman pointing out that their adversaries look like their evil doubles is pretty much the only ‘self-aware’ -and funniest- joke.

“The Rock” doesn’t take himself seriously and unsurprisingly brings the best human performance. Carano proves that she needs to flex her histrionic muscles if she wants a successful transition from the world of fighting to an acting career like Johnson’s. Luke Evans’s villain is so forgettable that the actor that shows up in the final “surprise scene” leaves a bigger impression than him.

The star of this show is Vin Diesel. If you are one of his fans ( 42 million and counting) you will probably enjoy his totem-stiff Toretto. If not, it may be hard to connect to an action hero that isn’t human: He doesn’t feel pain, doesn’t make mistakes, doesn’t joke, barely moves and gets all the beautiful women. If Superman spits blood in Man of Steel (according to the trailers), Toretto should be able to show some vulnerability. We would care more, even when we know he’s not going to die. After that soup-opera style “resurrection” of Letty, it is clear that the original models will run forever.

Fast and Furious 6 (Rápido y Furioso 6) is now in theaters.