Carmageddon It?

It is virtually unheard of in Hollywood that a movie in its sixth installment is not only going strong but still gaining momentum.  While most franchises end in trilogies, 'Fast & the Furious' breaks the mold, with no end in sight.  How something that started as a niche genre revolving around illegal after dark street racing can have so much box-office muscle ($170 million domestically in only its second week) is mindboggling, so I decided to watch 'Fast & Furious 6' to see what all the hoopla is about.
 

Before 'Fast & Furious 6' I've only seen the first two films, which I thought were okay but did not compel me to keep following a team of criminals who use their unique skills and nitrous oxide-boosted cars to pull off multi-million dollar heists, while always outrunning the law and even managing to, in the case of Paul Walker's FBI undercover agent Brian O'Connor, get them to betray their law-and-order cause and switch sides (having a hot sister played by Jordana Brewster helps).  But with 'Fast & Furious 4' and 'Fast Five' being the international smash hits (no pun intended) that they were, I thought it merited another look.

To say that F&F6 is action-packed would be an understatement.  The movie revved up the action even more from its predecessors, if that were possible.  This time, Vin Diesel's team is enticed out of retirement by The Rock's DSS agent Hobbs to pursue a team of savvy and elusive high-tech criminals who commit their crimes through vehicular mayhem, led by a former British SAS major named Owen Shaw (Luke Evans).  So F&F6 essentially became a Bond movie, but instead of a tux-wearing, martini-sipping international man of intrigue backed by MI6, we get a tank-top wearing, word-slurring bald cholo and his team of multi-ethnic misfits. 

And herein lies the movie's appeal.  The somewhat interchangeable characters in F&F may be 'crooks,' but they are eminently relatable and 'down-to-earth'; you can't help but root for them.  Dominic (Vin Diesel) is the perfect anti-hero, a flawed protagonist you can sympathize with.  He may be a heist-pulling  lawbreaker, but he operates within a personal 'code of honor' and mostly steals from bad guys like drug lords.  He treats his team members like family, and would do whatever it takes and even risk his life for them.

It doesn't matter that the movie has a paper-thin, pseudo-espionage plot centering on the theft of a NATO computer chip to build a device called 'Nightshade' that could paralyze power or networks (or whatever, it wasn't entirely clear) in a large swathe of territory.  All this is besides the point.  F&F6 is all about the fast cars, faster women, and the men who love them both.  The adrenaline-pumping chase scenes we've come to expect from F&F are there in abundance, including one with a tank that could do something like 70 mph.  Car wars, baby!  And then there's not one but two vicious, no-holds-barred cat fights between Michelle Rodriguez's Letty and Gina Carano's character (who cares what her name is), a DSS agent partnered with The Rock.  All this good stuff just makes me want to overlook the fact that F&F6 violates just about every law of physics (especially those pertaining to leaping from high speed vehicles - don't try this, kids) and is ignorant of how real world agencies operate (Diplomatic Security Service, really?).  Well, almost.

Grade: B