Fast & Furious 6 (2013)

Ride or Die, Remember?

I was personally not that interested in seeing the movie that I am reviewing. This is the sixth part in a movie series I have been mostly disinterested in all the way through. Whichever ones I saw of the first four did nothing for me, though I did enjoy the fifth one for what it was. When they released the sixth one, I still couldn’t muster any interest in it because 1/5 is still not a great ratio. But my friend Greg said that the sixth was worth seeing, more like the fifth than the other four that preceded. Jesus I’m sick of typing numbers! Let me do just one more as I review Fast & Furious 6, written by Chris Morgan, directed by Justin Lin, and starring Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez, Paul Walker, Dwayne Johnson, Luke Evans, Gina Carano, Tyrese Gibson, Chris Bridges, Sung Kang, Gal Gadot, John Ortiz, Joe Taslim, Clara Paget, Kim Kold, Jordana Brewster, and Elsa Pataky.

Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and his gang – Roman Pearce (Tyrese Gibson), Tej Parker (Chris Bridges), Han Seoul-Oh (Sung Kang), and Gisele Yashar (Gal Gadot) – have retired after becoming rich from their successful heist in Rio, and because Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker) and Dom’s sister Mia (Jordana Brewster) have spawned. DSS agent Luke Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) and his partner Riley Hicks (Gina Carano) have other things in mind for them, such as taking down a former British Special Forces soldier turned bad, Owen Shaw (Luke Evans), before he builds something bad. But Hobbs would need something big to make Dom come out of retirement and get the band back together, and something much more important than that being the cliché that starts all of these sorts of movies. Hobbs has just the thing. Dom’s former girlfriend and current amnesiac Letty Ortiz (Michelle Rodriguez) is a member of Shaw’s team. Let’s get these cliché’s started!

I didn’t go into this movie with any expectations, and I was right. Story is probably never going to be a strong point of the Fast movies, and I’m sure no one goes in with expectations of anything different. But the story of this movie was quite a trudge for me. How hard can you dig into the cliché barrel in one movie? Coming out of retirement. Getting the band back together. Amnesia. It’s like soap opera quality writing with a few more explosions and face-punches. And we got the band back together on the last movie! So you’re not only using clichés, you’re RE-using clichés! And if elements of your story hadn’t already been done to death, you could only manage passing sense with your own story elements. You have an important mission to accomplish, but you can take time out in the middle for a random street race? I know you could argue that Dom did it thinking that Letty would be there, but what was her justification for it? I think the only real argument you could make was that this is a Fast movie so they felt obligated to do it, whether it made sense or not. Maybe they just did it to keep the audience from getting bored, but it didn’t work on me. I was well into bored by the time Shaw and Dom met up after that for their scheduled dick-measuring contest. It also made no damned sense that Brian went back to LA to find out how Letty got involved. He flies back, gets himself arrested, gets himself thrown into solitary confinement, all just to talk to a mob boss and find out what bullshit they made up to justify Letty surviving the explosion that supposedly killed her. But then he returns and Dom says that information was just for him, and even Letty doesn’t care to hear about it, just accepting Brian’s apology and moving on. So that was a giant waste of time. The one-liners in the movie were hit-and-miss, but more miss than anything else. I liked Letty’s line about Team Muscle and Team Pussy, but a later line of “That ain’t a plane; it’s a planet” is just awful.

Let’s face facts: most people that are interested in this movie have no interest in the things I wrote about in the story paragraph. Hell, some of them can’t even read it. So let’s talk about the action. It was decent. The greater majority of the action in the bulk of the movie was nothing altogether spectacular to me, but I would give Fast 6 the credit for having a climax of the movie even more ridiculous and spectacular than the last movie, but it does take a little away from it that they spoil it right in the trailer. So they’ll take a plane down with cars and cables, eh? I don’t know if that’s physically possible, but I already know it’ll happen. And I didn’t even search out trailers for this movie! Spoilers were forced upon me! But I’ve also never really had that much interest in car stuff, so I started liking a little better when they threw a tank into the mix. I did think the race car was an interesting idea, using its leverage to topple opposition cars, but I also didn’t understand how it was so hard to take out when its wheels were completely exposed. The face-punching stuff was pretty good when it happened as well. The fight inside the plane was pretty exciting, and kind of reminded me of Uncharted, but I really spent the entire fight waiting for the inevitable moment when Hobbs threw down against Shaw’s giant muscle dude. I also found myself bothered by the fights between Letty and Hicks, because Letty came out on top both times. I know Letty was more the hero of the story and so she should win, but I do not accept Michelle Rodriguez winning a fight against Gina Carano. No matter how much Michelle Rodriguez acts like a man; Gina Carano would beat that ass.

Most of the performances were entirely underwhelming, as expected. Vin Diesel is rarely my cup of tea. He always talks like he’s being choked by his own neck muscles, or like the lady with a tracheotomy in the anti-smoking commercials. I’ve seen Paul Walker act once. I’ve seen him in many movies, but I’ve only seen him pull off acting once. This was not that movie. He wasn’t particularly bad in this one; he was just a non-entity. I do, however, tend to like Dwayne Johnson whenever I see him. He’s got a lot of charisma and is ripped as hell. He outshines everyone else in this movie easily, but that also doesn’t really seem like it’d be that difficult.

Fast & Furious 6 came slightly below meeting the expectations that I didn’t have for it. The story was cliché and predictable, and the acting was mostly underwhelming. The action was decent enough, and probably much more interesting to people that like action involving cars, but I personally was getting bored with most of the movie right up to the climax that was ridiculous and spectacular enough to make this movie just pass as watchable. If you like the other movies in the series, you’ve probably already seen it. Otherwise, I’d recommend this movie for a rental. Fast & Furious 6 gets “This code you live by makes you predictable” out of “If that’s what it takes. I just wanna race.”

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Fast Five (2011)

We Talkin’ or We Racin’?

Today’s movie was not so much of a review request, but a viewing request from my roommate Richard. He watched the movie yesterday and liked it so much that I had to watch it ASAP, and he liked it so much that he would watch it with me the day after watching it himself. I, however, was very skeptical. This movie is the 5th in a series of movies I’ve either hated or had no interest in whatsoever. But we all know that I’ll watch anything, and this movie was at least a big budget movie unlike other crap I’ve watched. So let’s see how this turned out. Today’s review is of Fast Five, written by Chris Morgan, directed by Justin Lin, and starring Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Jordana Brewster, Joaquim de Almeida, Tyrese Gibson, Chris “Ludacris” Bridges, Matt Schulze, Sung Kang, Gal Gadot, Tego Calderon, Don Omar, Elsa Pataky, and Geoff Meed.

Mia Toretto (Jordana Brewster) and her boyfriend Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker) break Mia’s brother, Dom (Vin Diesel), out of a bus taking him to jail. They go to Rio de Janeiro, get hunted by DSS agent Luke Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson), run afoul of crime lord Hernan Reyes (Joaquim de Almeida), and plan a heist to take all of Reyes’ money. They set up a team with Han Seoul-Oh (Sung Kang), Roman Pearce (Tyrese Gibson), Tej Parker (Ludacris), Gisele Yashar (Gal Gadot), Tego Leo (Tego Calderon), and Rico Santos (Don Omar) to accomplish the task of taking $100 million dollars from Reyes. But fuck all that “story” nonsense! Let’s smash cars with a safe!

I’m perfectly comfortable admitting the fact that I have little to no interest in cars and am a fairly poor excuse for a man. What I do tend to appreciate (possibly more than I should) is a big, dumb action movie. And that is the reason why Fast Five gets a “check it out” from me. That sounds like I’m ending the review. NAY! Just getting started. The story is a little dumb and filled with plot holes, but the action scenes are so absurd and awesome that I could not help but like this thing. Let’s take our good news first and talk about the action. This movie jumps immediately into it when 3 cars have to pull off a precision maneuver to flip over the bus that has Vin Diesel on it. They succeed, although I’m pretty sure he was the only person to survive it. Then there’s some story, then there’s a big fight scene on a train. It was pretty cool how they were getting the vehicles off of the train in the first place, and that immediately preceded a pretty brutal and awesome fight scene. Blah blah blah, a couple more races, and then the super climactic finale involving two cars, an improbably dragged safe, and a shit ton of safe-smashed objects. In between there was a race that confused me, though. Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Tyrese Gibson, and Sung Kang had all stolen identical cop cars and decide (without any real good reason) to have a street race with each other. The pointlessness of this decision is not what gets me though. Now, I don’t know much about cars, but if you had 4 identical cars with 4 professional drivers behind the wheels, wouldn’t they all go the same speed? Get back to me on that, readers. Or don’t. I don’t really want to know. Also, since we’re talking action, even the subtitles in this movie are in a hurry. As soon as you’ve read them, they speed off the screen. They were cute at first, but they get old pretty quick.

It won’t surprise many that the story of this movie was lackluster and was full of plot holes. It’s not why you came though; you can admit that to yourself. I have. But, I’m reviewing this thing, so I at least have to type it. Let’s go in order, because that’s how I took my notes. First off, do you think anybody has ever put Rio de Janeiro in a movie without an establishing shot of that giant Jesus? Anyways, the dialogue is pretty bad and predictable here. You can see almost every punchline coming from a mile away. Not to jokes. I’m not sure there were any. But most statements are set up in joke form, with a set up and a punchline finisher. At a certain point I realized, if I tried, I could probably finish most of these people’s sentences for them. Around the middle of the movie, our team breaks in to a Reyes facility wearing masks and then they pull them off and show themselves to their captives, telling them to tell their boss what they did. If you planned this, why not just go in sans mask? They burn the money after this. The rest of the money is in 9 different locations. Reyes says to himself, “Well, since they’re after my money which is separated and difficult to get to, I think I’ll bring all of it together and put it in a safe. No one’s EVER gotten into one of those!” The Rock’s character is able to figure out who is on Vin’s team from an intersection camera, but really that would mean he and his team looked through every car that went through that intersection and, through dumb luck, stumbled on the masked team passing through it. And THEN, using technology that I’m not sure exists, used a computer to identify them using only their eyes. Is that possible? I mean, I could tell it was the Asian dude by his eyes, but only because he was the only Asian in all of Rio de Janeiro. The process of the team getting to the safe is pretty stupid as well. At first, Tyrese tries to talk his way in using a badge and ID so poorly counterfeited that it actually says he’s Caucasian. The desk guard doesn’t allow him in, but also doesn’t bother to arrest him or report the incident as suspicious. Cashiers at Best Buy have more sense. (No offense, cashiers from Best Buy) Then they let two of the team disguised as random janitors waltz right in and cut a hole in the wall to tap into the security cameras. Not only is there no background check, but no one brings up how the police managed not to notice a giant square had been cut into the wall. They didn’t have any plaster with them, so even if they replaced the slab of cement they removed, someone could have thought about that square in the wall. A lot of what they get away with in this movie depends heavily on everyone else being stupid. This camera footage leads to them spending days trying to make it through a course trying to avoid the cameras until they finally say “Fuck it, we’ll just steal cop cars.” Why not start with that idea?! Also – as I think is typical for these racing-type movies – it seems as if the writers use NOS as a deus ex machina type of thing. Like they write themselves into a corner like “People will believe 2 cars can drag a giant safe around without putting a scratch in the road, but one car? How are we going to do that? Slap some NOS in that car we haven’t seen until now!” There’s also a race in the movie when they acquire a car they never use. Why isn’t this in the action paragraph? ‘Cause they didn’t show it! They apparently thought people came to this movie for the dialogue. Not that it matters, most of the dialogue is drowned out by the action. And not that THAT matters, because the dialogue isn’t very good.

Here’s the thing that has popped into my head during any of the Fast/Furious movies that kept popping up in this movie as well: Paul Walker is the worst. The worst ever at everything. He’s got no charisma whatsoever, and every line he delivers makes it seem like he’s super bored. And that’s not just this movie, but every movie I’ve seen him in save for Running Scared. And I don’t even remember what happened in that. I just recall seeing a movie he wasn’t awful in. It’s a bit harsh, but true. Singling him out from the get-go does not let everyone else off the hook. Almost everyone in this movie did nothing to wow me. The Rock was the best actor in this movie, which isn’t a backhanded compliment. I like the Rock. I’ve never seen him really stretch his acting chops, but he is charming on screen so I’m never sad to see him. And not only is he charming, but he throws down better than most action stars. Richard and I wondered as we watched this movie how many times these people broke into laughter at the other person’s performances. Vin Diesel wasn’t bad, but he didn’t really have any charisma here. Jordana Brewster is cute, but not hot enough, and she never wore anything that caused me to even glance at her. Gal Gadot was brought in for the hotness, which she does have AND she gets into a bikini, but she borders on TOO skinny.

That is probably the most I’ve ever made fun of a movie that I actually claimed to enjoy. The plot holes are abundant, the story mediocre, and the dialogue bad and predictable. If you’re going to see Fast Five for it’s highly cerebral storyline (Thanks for the joke, Seth MacFarlane!), you’ll be disappointed … and stupid. Very stupid. We know why we watched this: the action! And it has that. The action was spread out by crappy story a little much for my taste, but the spectacular stunts are worth sitting through that. I say see this movie. You can fast forward through the talking, if you like. You won’t miss much. Fast Five gets “This shit just went from mission: impossible to mission: in-freaking-sanity” out of “This doesn’t make any sense”.

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