#110 Fast and Furious 6

Fast and Furious 6 (2013)

Dir: Justin Lin

The longest runway… in the world! (Best imagined in the voice of Jeremy Clarkson).

Following in the tyre-marks of 2011’s ‘Fast 5’ this again sees the main characters from the original films come together again, not just for some fun driving, but now to work with law enforcement led by DSS agent Hobbs (The Rock) to take down a petrol-headed bad guy (Luke Evans).

This franchise had gone on far longer and been more succesful than many expected it would, including me. It really went downhill with Tokyo Drift, but then was revived by bringing back the original cast in the fourth instalment ‘Fast and Furious’ then bringing in some other characters in ‘Fast Five’. The writers have kept a lot of what they did with that film, including the habit of writing some very silly lines, especially for Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson’s character Hobbs. Fast 5 had the king of odd cringe-worthy lines with that character asking for bad news by saying “hit me with the veggies”.

It’s like the writers work on the script while they’re wired on copious amounts of energy drinks, throwing in ideas that aren’t really thought out. Take for example this film’s climactic scene on a runway, don’t worry I won’t spoil anything that’s not in the trailer, which if you haven’t seen it is available by clicking on the poster below. With a plane rolling along chased by powerful cars for quite a complex and drawn out sequence, this runway is almost impossibly long, for the mathematical analysis of this take a look at the BBC website article here, but the conclusion of matters is that it must be the longest runway in the world… by over 5 times!

Still, that being said it really is a lot of good fun, and for me that’s what it should be and definitely the strength of the recent films. Here they have gone past levels of believability and into slightly ridiculous, but with tongues placed firmly in their cheeks.

There is an attempt to validate the lesser ‘Tokyo Drift’ film and bring it more into line with the others, with a very revealing post credit sequence. The sequence interestingly wasn’t exactly post-credits at all, it seems like it had been moved forward to the start of the credits, clearly for the target audience who can’t stay still in their seats to wait a few minutes for that little extra, which says a lot.

A sequel, ‘Fast 7’, is already in the works, with a key character from the not-so-post-credit sequence looking likely to feature heavily and cause some trouble for the team. Likely that could prove to be the last in the series as it’s now in surprisingly high numbers of films and the actors are getting older… or possibly not!

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