SPOILERS - rambling about Fast Six post-viewing
Mods, I hope this is allowed but will be happy to amend if not
I went to see Six as soon as it opened here a few hours ago, and have tried to gather my thoughts on it below, hoping to discuss impressions with fellow fangirls. Beware if you are spoiler-averse.
You’ve been warned. This is as close to a scene-by-scene commentary as it gets. If you don't want to read spoilers, go back now!
Also, it is quite critical and hugely subjective - apologies in advance for any overly-grumpy comments you may strongly disagree with - but both the subjectivity and the criticism are the result of deep fangirl love for the series. If, having seen Fast Six and having read this, you feel like sharing your impressions and/or arguing with me, I am happy and grateful in advance.
My shortest write-up would be a tie between two four-word summaries, good but not great and James Bond on steroids. Actually, make it a five-word “collective James Bond on steroids”. After the non-stop exhilaration of Fast Five, Six, despite its tons of stunts, felt like coming off a high, or perhaps - hopefully - like sitting through a long interlude that sets things up for the seventh film. I did like it (subjectively, I’d rate the first film a 7.5 or, being generous, 8 out of 10, the second one a 4.5, the third one a 4, the fourth a 9, the fifth a 10 and this one, ironically, a 6). Still, whether because of my high expectations or because of the pitfalls of big ensemble casts (see next para), or as the usual consequence of sequels upping the action ante until the plot gets lost in the stunts, this one seemed too detached from its own characters to be really gripping.
But it has its highlights.
Fast Five could have been a splendid finale to the series (at least until we learned about Letty’s survival, which was still a great twist both in itself and in promising a sequel), but picking up after Five gave the scriptwriters too many characters to follow. Each of the predecessor films until Five focused on a “subset” of the team. Five brought them together and worked beautifully as an ensemble piece par excellence, but continuing as one is trickier the second time around. There are too many nods to make to each team member and each subplot, and the characters often end up seeming like little more than vehicles (sorry for the bad pun, but it fits) taking the plot from A to B, which is especially obvious with the girls. Letty, Gisele, Mia, Elena all seem (even) more like plot devices than they did in the previous films (so does newcomer Riley); but then the guys fare only marginally better. The parallel it calls to mind, sadly, is one with Ocean’s Twelve and Thirteen vs. Eleven: a big gang is lots of fun the first time around, but bring them together again and the plot gets bogged down in trying to give all the members their screen-time due and in squeezing in a modicum of character development for most of them, with disappointing results. You want to see them together, but the “team movie” sequel often ends up being more of a nostalgic tribute to the “team movie” original than a fun film in its own right.
OK, back to Six. I loved the opening sequence that seemed, for an exciting, wide-silly-grin minute, to be picking up exactly where Fast Five left off, in the tradition of Five picking up off the cliffhanger ending of Fast & Furious. Even when it becomes clear that it is no longer the same race, it still stands out as a highlight. Also, good job skipping past the “push etc” gory details of the baby’s birth, and major thanks from this baby-scream-abhorring bitch for making Brian and Mia’s son an incredibly well-behaved baby; and I loved the scene later where Dom gives his nephew a toy Charger (and subjectively, I like the fact that they have a boy, but YMMV. Twins would have been fun, but I suppose the “twins” reports at the time of filming were due to the need to have a baby “double”). The four-film (sans Tokyo) montage that follows to the tune of We Own It is pure nostalgic gold; I know montages are considered tacky, but in a series that is on its sixth installment, it is damn time they did one!
I’ve lived in Moscow and had to laugh at the next sequence introducing the Shaw plot supposedly set a few hundred yards from the Kremlin in what is very obviously London; I’d have thought that in a film with a nine-digit budget, they’d spring for more advanced CGI than crudely superimposing a Kremlin backdrop onto a London city/bridge foreground. Also, I hope I was confused and they did not really try to imply that the huge Interpol office building they show next is *in* Moscow; I am 99,9% sure that reality is vastly different and more like a small liaison office... but then it did not look anything like the ultra-modern Interpol Lyon headquarters either. And the Interpol normally does not dispatch huge SWAT-like teams to run around the world save for small teams in really exceptional cases, relying instead on local forces. But I digress, and may be overly nitpicky. On the plus side, they used genuine Russians to voice the final-sequence plane crew. Whether the characters’ Spanish accent in some of the subsequent scenes was intentionally atrocious (at least as dubbed by Italians here) or not, I cannot tell.
I am glad they did not have a Dom-Elena sex scene at the Canaries villa that one of the promo stills seemed to hint at; it would have seemed out of place. But Dom’s and Hobbs’s meeting feels underplayed, even though the trailer pretty much spoiled this scene in its entirety so it should have come as no surprise. Not that they needed to have a big fight, but its zero adrenaline quotient was disappointing. I mean, Hobbs looked pretty predatory and determined at the end of Five and spent late nights in the office looking for Dom & Co; how come he mellowed out so much by the beginning of Six, which apparently takes place a few weeks later? And while I am not complaining about generally seeing Hobbs and Dom as action buddies in Six, I think the writers could have had more fun throwing in occasional tension and snark between them in addition to Dom's mild “cop” jibe. Dom’s seemingly-calm reaction to Letty’s photos, on the other hand, seems in-character and IMO well done. And Elena’s murdered-husband back story pays off here to explain her laissez-faire forgiving "because if it were my husband I'd go" reaction to Dom instantly ditching her, though it also has a big whiff of the plot-device girl syndrome.
The short-ish getting the team together sequence is more functional than exciting, but the highlight here is the Han-Gisele back-to-back Mexican standoff scene. Generally throughout the film, they were, to me, the real star couple, totally badass but also non-annoyingly sweet and believably in love; it made knowing that Gisele would die toward the end all the sadder (I went to see it completely and intentionally spoiled). The scriptwriters must have thought it necessary because they had to kill someone from Team Toretto and because she is not in Tokyo Drift so killing her was the easiest way to explain her absence and to give Han a death wish as a bonus - but still, damn.
On the plus side, there are nice in-joke touches throughout the film, like Dom’s above-mentioned picking on Hobbs by calling him a cop in the only snarky exchanges between them (at least I assume that’s what Dom called him from the translated equivalent); Rome’s plane bearing the “It’s Roman, bitches” logo; Hobbs shooting the vending machine so that ever-hungry Rome can have a snack “on the house”; Roman’s (IIRC - he and Tej were fighting over it) firing the harpoon gun and getting mega death glares from Dom and Han, both of whom it nearly missed; Hobbs’ “Captain America” moment at, IIRC, New Scotland Yard and his “Samoan Thor” nickname on Tej’s phone that one of the reviewers noticed, etc.
Owen Shaw is nowhere near as compelling an antagonist as Hobbs’ Fast Five antihero and not as ferally menacing as F&F’s Fenix, and his interest in Letty is rather unconvincing (though maybe it is meant to be), but he is more hands-on than the rather generic Reyes and Braga, has a good explosive escape intro scene, and generally holds his own as a functional baddie (until, that is, he is required to go berserk flattening cars on the Spanish freeway to confirm his irredeemable villainy). Unlike Bond films, however, this has never been a baddie-centric franchise; if anything, the attempt to give more prominence to the baddies here by constructing an obvious parallel to Team Toretto (and more specifically, by making Gina Carano’s Riley an exact mirror image of Letty) falls rather flat.
London works quite well IMO as the location for a big chunk of the film; it stands up particularly well in night shots, with its bright lights and well-illuminated landmarks and all. The first race scene (chasing Shaw’s team) is fun to watch (and the fact that it was shot in, IICR, Glasgow is not too obvious). The second one sticks out as something of a sore-thumb copy-and-paste from earlier films’ LA racing, but it is necessary for the plot - more on that next.
My rather sad general observation - and I actually hope that fellow fangirls disagree - is that this one is not only the least bromancey of all Fast & Furious films save perhaps for Tokyo Drift, but the least “shippery” overall, despite being set up ostensibly as Letty and Dom’s reunion film. I applaud the script’s slow and relatively low-key approach to handling the storyline of their reacquaintance that avoids being overly-melodramatic despite the intentionally angsty (but effective) bit where she coolly shoots Dom first time she sees him (however, the final outcome is pretty clear from the start), but IMO it does not quite deliver. I wonder if it is the amnesia cliché that also unfortunately translates into mostly-blank-faced acting from Michelle Rodriguez or the fact that their storyline’s later crucial moments are overshadowed by the stunt overload in the final scenes, but the result is that with the exception of the London race, the rest of Dom and Letty’s story here lacks real tension. I can only hope that it was my biased view. On the plus side, their London race is really fun and the UST there, starting with Dom's smouldering eyes watching her walk around and until he wins the race, is pretty much as off-the-scale as the Dom-Brian UST in the races in the original and in F&F... but then it dips as soon as they stop and Dom starts waxing lyrical about Letty’s scars. I just wish that, so long as it was the predestined Dom-Letty film, they’d managed to keep their relations at that "race-like" level of intensity for the remainder of it.
As a Dom/Brian shipper, though, I was more sorely disappointed by the total lack of fangirl fodder in that quarter. The original and F&F were eyesex extraordinaire, dripping with barely suppressed desire. It was toned down in Five, but we still had Dom saving Brian in the train jump and the heart-to-heart about family and the final vault-dragging sequence that was pure sex on wheels. Here, all we get is Dom's almost-ominous "everything has changed" when the baby is born, Dom's halfhearted arguing with Brian's halfhearted self-flagellation over setting up Letty in F&F, and as the only real highlight, a few sublime but painfully short seconds of intense gazing when Brian takes it upon himself to go back to LA. But then... Dom’s reaction when Brian comes back? Blank stare. Brian’s reaction when Dom is briefly presumed dead? Blank stare. When Dom turns up alive? Brian is too busy hugging Mia by then. What a letdown. Bad, bad writers, cramming in all the fanfic tropes (Brian in prison? Check. Letty an amnesiac? Check. Mia kidnapped? etc.) except the really important one >: [
That said, Paul Walker still looks good in the role. In this one he has lost the last vestiges of the crazy kid and grown up into a man; a bit sad but, at least, believable. And he has his shining moments in the LA sequence, from the initially-hilarious reunion with Stasiak (the broken nose déjà vu was priceless, if painful for the poor guy; also, Stasiak, like Hobbs, seems to have mellowed out a good deal) - I only wish they’d have given Sophie Trinh a cameo as well, but anyway - to the jail scenes and the tough talk with Braga (along with the hilarious split second of oh shit when the cell door slides open) and the seriously badass fight that follows.
On the downside, that same sequence, along with preceding scenes, makes me angry about the way scriptwriters kept shortchanging Gisele. How the hell is it possible that as Braga's ex-bodyguard, she had no idea Braga had been working for Shaw? I know they only decided on it when plotting Six, but what happened to their retrofitting skillz? They say Shaw is ultra-secretive and all that, but hell, Gisele is a smart girl, she should have figured it out, or at least picked up leads, and it would have been more fun showing that. Also, as a weapons expert (wasn't she, in Five?) there is no way she would have been utterly ignorant about the workings of Shaw’s superweapon in earlier London scenes. Sure, the scriptwriters needed someone to ask about it so that Hobbs could deliver the exposition, but making Gisele look clueless made her seem unfairly unprofessional. Then again, they also made Fenix look momentously stupid by having him just blow up Letty’s car instead of shooting her in the F&F flashback, and never check if she had survived. I know they needed a retrofit badly here, but this was just damn lazy of both Fenix and the scriptwriters. And why should Braga & Co care enough to cover up Letty’s survival by presumably supplying a stand-in charred body for her funeral (because how else could they have fooled the FBI and Mia and everyone?) OK, I suppose they are sure no one watches these films for the plot :P
Somewhat related to the scriptwriting laziness is increased physical implausibility. By upping the stunt ante and sticking in deus-ex-machina highlights wherever the plot falls short, Six has brought the franchise from merely taking liberties with the laws of physics into bona fide sci-fi territory. More precisely, at some point or another, practically each member of Dom’s team - with the exception of Gisele who “needs to die” (hell, using this film’s physics, she could have survived the fall!) - takes an utterly improbable twenty-yard flying leap, lands with perfect precision onto a moving vehicle with no bodily damage whatsoever despite having next to no body armour, and stays on said vehicle. Hobbs, Dom, Letty, Rome (though I admit that Brian saving Rome was a nice touch)... if this trend continues, they’ll be flying around, circling the Earth and swinging on spider webs in Fast Seven. Not coincidentally, the last part of the film, where said laws of physics totally take a hike, is the weakest overall, which distinguishes it sadly from the conclusions of both F&F and Five. I suppose they had to make the super-long plane takeoff sequence a nighttime scene to cut on computer graphics and make the stunt set-up and editing easier, and probably to make the explosion look more spectacular, but the dark background muddled most of that sequence into a barely intelligible, choppily edited jumble of people fighting, cars being dragged around, and the plane forever hovering ten feet above the runway. Why couldn’t it take off, seriously? Can four cars really hold down a cargo plane that size with harpoons and cables [outside of The Empire Strikes Back]? I could be wrong, of course, and I kind of hope I am and their technical consultants are more competent than I imagine, but it does seem suspect. And don't get me started on Dom's car busting out of the burning plane...
I have read a review that complained about Mia’s eleventh-hour kidnapping being a wasted and rushed plot twist; and when I saw it on screen I could not agree more. Mia gets next to no screen time in Six (OK, that is plausible, baby and all), but when she finally gets her moment, it seems like a promising juicy subplot reduced to a two-minute pre-flight / pre-fight intro; its only praiseworthy payoff is the great moment when Hobbs pulls a gun on the NATO officers, siding with Dom’s team. Dom’s all-too-stoical reaction to MIa's kidnapping does seem OOC, and once Mia has served her plot-device purpose, she melts into the background - literally, stuck into the back seat! What the reviewer did not mention is that the writers also wasted any dramatic potential that could have been gained from Dom’s presumed death in the plane explosion. His absence was entirely too brief to create any tension, the team’s reaction was too blank to give us a sense of the heartbreak they must have felt, and his anticlimactic near-immediate reappearance brought only Letty strolling over to greet him. I know it was *the* crucial Dom-and-Letty scene in a Dom-and-Letty-centered film and they needed some time one-on-one, but based on what we know of the Toretto extended-family team, if they’d thought him dead, even briefly, they would have wanted to give him a hug or a slap on the back sooner rather than later upon seeing him alive (unless, like in Five, there were guys training guns on them at the moment). Another touch of plausibility sacrificed to expediency.
And sorry to be ending this on a bum note, but the final scene in LA seemed to me more like an illustration of “you can’t relive the past even if you try” than the heartwarming, back-home, coming-full-circle moment the writers must have had in mind (and poor Elena’s public farewell stuck in the middle of the homecoming is particularly contrived). Again, I hope it’s me, but the upbeat, thrilling, Danza Kuduro-infused coda to Fast Five - or the tense and promising cliffhanger of Fast & Furious - was conspicuous by its absence. Tying in Tokyo Drift and revealing Jason Statham as the Fast Seven antagonist was a bleak payoff by comparison.
I realise I must have sounded like an awfully grumpy bitch throughout, and have heaped all blame on the scriptwriters where some of it probably belongs to the actors and Justin Lin. In truth, Six has enough to recommend it; but unlike the better films in the saga, it does not stand well on its own - I don’t mean the need for prior knowledge to understand the plot, but the fact that Six's popularity (which I still hope it will enjoy) is likely to be owed to the franchise's, and particularly Five's, "reflected sunshine". I just hope that Seven is enough of a fun ride to make this one a worthy interim installment when viewed as part of the bigger picture. At least the wait is only a year this time ;)
PS [Naturally,] none of the above will stop me from watching it on the big screen a second time, just to check if I missed any interesting and/or slashy bits on the first viewing.
What did you think? Did you pick up more romance or bromance than I did in there? What do you see happening in Fast Seven, besides the already-telegraphed Tokyo race(s) involving Dom and the team squaring off with Statham? As a semi-wild guess, I'd suppose it would be largely based in Asia (ETA: just read about Vin Diesel saying it would be the Middle East instead - Dubai I suppose), bring back Hobbs again, and have Brian or Dom or Hobbs as a "damsel in distress" hostage/prisoner at some point; since they have already ticked that box with Mia and, in a way, with Letty in Six, and kidnapping baby Jack is, hopefully, too worn a cliche to be used. OK, they've already done it with Dom, too, at the end of F&F, but there is no such thing as too much goodness :P
I went to see Six as soon as it opened here a few hours ago, and have tried to gather my thoughts on it below, hoping to discuss impressions with fellow fangirls. Beware if you are spoiler-averse.
You’ve been warned. This is as close to a scene-by-scene commentary as it gets. If you don't want to read spoilers, go back now!
Also, it is quite critical and hugely subjective - apologies in advance for any overly-grumpy comments you may strongly disagree with - but both the subjectivity and the criticism are the result of deep fangirl love for the series. If, having seen Fast Six and having read this, you feel like sharing your impressions and/or arguing with me, I am happy and grateful in advance.
My shortest write-up would be a tie between two four-word summaries, good but not great and James Bond on steroids. Actually, make it a five-word “collective James Bond on steroids”. After the non-stop exhilaration of Fast Five, Six, despite its tons of stunts, felt like coming off a high, or perhaps - hopefully - like sitting through a long interlude that sets things up for the seventh film. I did like it (subjectively, I’d rate the first film a 7.5 or, being generous, 8 out of 10, the second one a 4.5, the third one a 4, the fourth a 9, the fifth a 10 and this one, ironically, a 6). Still, whether because of my high expectations or because of the pitfalls of big ensemble casts (see next para), or as the usual consequence of sequels upping the action ante until the plot gets lost in the stunts, this one seemed too detached from its own characters to be really gripping.
But it has its highlights.
Fast Five could have been a splendid finale to the series (at least until we learned about Letty’s survival, which was still a great twist both in itself and in promising a sequel), but picking up after Five gave the scriptwriters too many characters to follow. Each of the predecessor films until Five focused on a “subset” of the team. Five brought them together and worked beautifully as an ensemble piece par excellence, but continuing as one is trickier the second time around. There are too many nods to make to each team member and each subplot, and the characters often end up seeming like little more than vehicles (sorry for the bad pun, but it fits) taking the plot from A to B, which is especially obvious with the girls. Letty, Gisele, Mia, Elena all seem (even) more like plot devices than they did in the previous films (so does newcomer Riley); but then the guys fare only marginally better. The parallel it calls to mind, sadly, is one with Ocean’s Twelve and Thirteen vs. Eleven: a big gang is lots of fun the first time around, but bring them together again and the plot gets bogged down in trying to give all the members their screen-time due and in squeezing in a modicum of character development for most of them, with disappointing results. You want to see them together, but the “team movie” sequel often ends up being more of a nostalgic tribute to the “team movie” original than a fun film in its own right.
OK, back to Six. I loved the opening sequence that seemed, for an exciting, wide-silly-grin minute, to be picking up exactly where Fast Five left off, in the tradition of Five picking up off the cliffhanger ending of Fast & Furious. Even when it becomes clear that it is no longer the same race, it still stands out as a highlight. Also, good job skipping past the “push etc” gory details of the baby’s birth, and major thanks from this baby-scream-abhorring bitch for making Brian and Mia’s son an incredibly well-behaved baby; and I loved the scene later where Dom gives his nephew a toy Charger (and subjectively, I like the fact that they have a boy, but YMMV. Twins would have been fun, but I suppose the “twins” reports at the time of filming were due to the need to have a baby “double”). The four-film (sans Tokyo) montage that follows to the tune of We Own It is pure nostalgic gold; I know montages are considered tacky, but in a series that is on its sixth installment, it is damn time they did one!
I’ve lived in Moscow and had to laugh at the next sequence introducing the Shaw plot supposedly set a few hundred yards from the Kremlin in what is very obviously London; I’d have thought that in a film with a nine-digit budget, they’d spring for more advanced CGI than crudely superimposing a Kremlin backdrop onto a London city/bridge foreground. Also, I hope I was confused and they did not really try to imply that the huge Interpol office building they show next is *in* Moscow; I am 99,9% sure that reality is vastly different and more like a small liaison office... but then it did not look anything like the ultra-modern Interpol Lyon headquarters either. And the Interpol normally does not dispatch huge SWAT-like teams to run around the world save for small teams in really exceptional cases, relying instead on local forces. But I digress, and may be overly nitpicky. On the plus side, they used genuine Russians to voice the final-sequence plane crew. Whether the characters’ Spanish accent in some of the subsequent scenes was intentionally atrocious (at least as dubbed by Italians here) or not, I cannot tell.
I am glad they did not have a Dom-Elena sex scene at the Canaries villa that one of the promo stills seemed to hint at; it would have seemed out of place. But Dom’s and Hobbs’s meeting feels underplayed, even though the trailer pretty much spoiled this scene in its entirety so it should have come as no surprise. Not that they needed to have a big fight, but its zero adrenaline quotient was disappointing. I mean, Hobbs looked pretty predatory and determined at the end of Five and spent late nights in the office looking for Dom & Co; how come he mellowed out so much by the beginning of Six, which apparently takes place a few weeks later? And while I am not complaining about generally seeing Hobbs and Dom as action buddies in Six, I think the writers could have had more fun throwing in occasional tension and snark between them in addition to Dom's mild “cop” jibe. Dom’s seemingly-calm reaction to Letty’s photos, on the other hand, seems in-character and IMO well done. And Elena’s murdered-husband back story pays off here to explain her laissez-faire forgiving "because if it were my husband I'd go" reaction to Dom instantly ditching her, though it also has a big whiff of the plot-device girl syndrome.
The short-ish getting the team together sequence is more functional than exciting, but the highlight here is the Han-Gisele back-to-back Mexican standoff scene. Generally throughout the film, they were, to me, the real star couple, totally badass but also non-annoyingly sweet and believably in love; it made knowing that Gisele would die toward the end all the sadder (I went to see it completely and intentionally spoiled). The scriptwriters must have thought it necessary because they had to kill someone from Team Toretto and because she is not in Tokyo Drift so killing her was the easiest way to explain her absence and to give Han a death wish as a bonus - but still, damn.
On the plus side, there are nice in-joke touches throughout the film, like Dom’s above-mentioned picking on Hobbs by calling him a cop in the only snarky exchanges between them (at least I assume that’s what Dom called him from the translated equivalent); Rome’s plane bearing the “It’s Roman, bitches” logo; Hobbs shooting the vending machine so that ever-hungry Rome can have a snack “on the house”; Roman’s (IIRC - he and Tej were fighting over it) firing the harpoon gun and getting mega death glares from Dom and Han, both of whom it nearly missed; Hobbs’ “Captain America” moment at, IIRC, New Scotland Yard and his “Samoan Thor” nickname on Tej’s phone that one of the reviewers noticed, etc.
Owen Shaw is nowhere near as compelling an antagonist as Hobbs’ Fast Five antihero and not as ferally menacing as F&F’s Fenix, and his interest in Letty is rather unconvincing (though maybe it is meant to be), but he is more hands-on than the rather generic Reyes and Braga, has a good explosive escape intro scene, and generally holds his own as a functional baddie (until, that is, he is required to go berserk flattening cars on the Spanish freeway to confirm his irredeemable villainy). Unlike Bond films, however, this has never been a baddie-centric franchise; if anything, the attempt to give more prominence to the baddies here by constructing an obvious parallel to Team Toretto (and more specifically, by making Gina Carano’s Riley an exact mirror image of Letty) falls rather flat.
London works quite well IMO as the location for a big chunk of the film; it stands up particularly well in night shots, with its bright lights and well-illuminated landmarks and all. The first race scene (chasing Shaw’s team) is fun to watch (and the fact that it was shot in, IICR, Glasgow is not too obvious). The second one sticks out as something of a sore-thumb copy-and-paste from earlier films’ LA racing, but it is necessary for the plot - more on that next.
My rather sad general observation - and I actually hope that fellow fangirls disagree - is that this one is not only the least bromancey of all Fast & Furious films save perhaps for Tokyo Drift, but the least “shippery” overall, despite being set up ostensibly as Letty and Dom’s reunion film. I applaud the script’s slow and relatively low-key approach to handling the storyline of their reacquaintance that avoids being overly-melodramatic despite the intentionally angsty (but effective) bit where she coolly shoots Dom first time she sees him (however, the final outcome is pretty clear from the start), but IMO it does not quite deliver. I wonder if it is the amnesia cliché that also unfortunately translates into mostly-blank-faced acting from Michelle Rodriguez or the fact that their storyline’s later crucial moments are overshadowed by the stunt overload in the final scenes, but the result is that with the exception of the London race, the rest of Dom and Letty’s story here lacks real tension. I can only hope that it was my biased view. On the plus side, their London race is really fun and the UST there, starting with Dom's smouldering eyes watching her walk around and until he wins the race, is pretty much as off-the-scale as the Dom-Brian UST in the races in the original and in F&F... but then it dips as soon as they stop and Dom starts waxing lyrical about Letty’s scars. I just wish that, so long as it was the predestined Dom-Letty film, they’d managed to keep their relations at that "race-like" level of intensity for the remainder of it.
As a Dom/Brian shipper, though, I was more sorely disappointed by the total lack of fangirl fodder in that quarter. The original and F&F were eyesex extraordinaire, dripping with barely suppressed desire. It was toned down in Five, but we still had Dom saving Brian in the train jump and the heart-to-heart about family and the final vault-dragging sequence that was pure sex on wheels. Here, all we get is Dom's almost-ominous "everything has changed" when the baby is born, Dom's halfhearted arguing with Brian's halfhearted self-flagellation over setting up Letty in F&F, and as the only real highlight, a few sublime but painfully short seconds of intense gazing when Brian takes it upon himself to go back to LA. But then... Dom’s reaction when Brian comes back? Blank stare. Brian’s reaction when Dom is briefly presumed dead? Blank stare. When Dom turns up alive? Brian is too busy hugging Mia by then. What a letdown. Bad, bad writers, cramming in all the fanfic tropes (Brian in prison? Check. Letty an amnesiac? Check. Mia kidnapped? etc.) except the really important one >: [
That said, Paul Walker still looks good in the role. In this one he has lost the last vestiges of the crazy kid and grown up into a man; a bit sad but, at least, believable. And he has his shining moments in the LA sequence, from the initially-hilarious reunion with Stasiak (the broken nose déjà vu was priceless, if painful for the poor guy; also, Stasiak, like Hobbs, seems to have mellowed out a good deal) - I only wish they’d have given Sophie Trinh a cameo as well, but anyway - to the jail scenes and the tough talk with Braga (along with the hilarious split second of oh shit when the cell door slides open) and the seriously badass fight that follows.
On the downside, that same sequence, along with preceding scenes, makes me angry about the way scriptwriters kept shortchanging Gisele. How the hell is it possible that as Braga's ex-bodyguard, she had no idea Braga had been working for Shaw? I know they only decided on it when plotting Six, but what happened to their retrofitting skillz? They say Shaw is ultra-secretive and all that, but hell, Gisele is a smart girl, she should have figured it out, or at least picked up leads, and it would have been more fun showing that. Also, as a weapons expert (wasn't she, in Five?) there is no way she would have been utterly ignorant about the workings of Shaw’s superweapon in earlier London scenes. Sure, the scriptwriters needed someone to ask about it so that Hobbs could deliver the exposition, but making Gisele look clueless made her seem unfairly unprofessional. Then again, they also made Fenix look momentously stupid by having him just blow up Letty’s car instead of shooting her in the F&F flashback, and never check if she had survived. I know they needed a retrofit badly here, but this was just damn lazy of both Fenix and the scriptwriters. And why should Braga & Co care enough to cover up Letty’s survival by presumably supplying a stand-in charred body for her funeral (because how else could they have fooled the FBI and Mia and everyone?) OK, I suppose they are sure no one watches these films for the plot :P
Somewhat related to the scriptwriting laziness is increased physical implausibility. By upping the stunt ante and sticking in deus-ex-machina highlights wherever the plot falls short, Six has brought the franchise from merely taking liberties with the laws of physics into bona fide sci-fi territory. More precisely, at some point or another, practically each member of Dom’s team - with the exception of Gisele who “needs to die” (hell, using this film’s physics, she could have survived the fall!) - takes an utterly improbable twenty-yard flying leap, lands with perfect precision onto a moving vehicle with no bodily damage whatsoever despite having next to no body armour, and stays on said vehicle. Hobbs, Dom, Letty, Rome (though I admit that Brian saving Rome was a nice touch)... if this trend continues, they’ll be flying around, circling the Earth and swinging on spider webs in Fast Seven. Not coincidentally, the last part of the film, where said laws of physics totally take a hike, is the weakest overall, which distinguishes it sadly from the conclusions of both F&F and Five. I suppose they had to make the super-long plane takeoff sequence a nighttime scene to cut on computer graphics and make the stunt set-up and editing easier, and probably to make the explosion look more spectacular, but the dark background muddled most of that sequence into a barely intelligible, choppily edited jumble of people fighting, cars being dragged around, and the plane forever hovering ten feet above the runway. Why couldn’t it take off, seriously? Can four cars really hold down a cargo plane that size with harpoons and cables [outside of The Empire Strikes Back]? I could be wrong, of course, and I kind of hope I am and their technical consultants are more competent than I imagine, but it does seem suspect. And don't get me started on Dom's car busting out of the burning plane...
I have read a review that complained about Mia’s eleventh-hour kidnapping being a wasted and rushed plot twist; and when I saw it on screen I could not agree more. Mia gets next to no screen time in Six (OK, that is plausible, baby and all), but when she finally gets her moment, it seems like a promising juicy subplot reduced to a two-minute pre-flight / pre-fight intro; its only praiseworthy payoff is the great moment when Hobbs pulls a gun on the NATO officers, siding with Dom’s team. Dom’s all-too-stoical reaction to MIa's kidnapping does seem OOC, and once Mia has served her plot-device purpose, she melts into the background - literally, stuck into the back seat! What the reviewer did not mention is that the writers also wasted any dramatic potential that could have been gained from Dom’s presumed death in the plane explosion. His absence was entirely too brief to create any tension, the team’s reaction was too blank to give us a sense of the heartbreak they must have felt, and his anticlimactic near-immediate reappearance brought only Letty strolling over to greet him. I know it was *the* crucial Dom-and-Letty scene in a Dom-and-Letty-centered film and they needed some time one-on-one, but based on what we know of the Toretto extended-family team, if they’d thought him dead, even briefly, they would have wanted to give him a hug or a slap on the back sooner rather than later upon seeing him alive (unless, like in Five, there were guys training guns on them at the moment). Another touch of plausibility sacrificed to expediency.
And sorry to be ending this on a bum note, but the final scene in LA seemed to me more like an illustration of “you can’t relive the past even if you try” than the heartwarming, back-home, coming-full-circle moment the writers must have had in mind (and poor Elena’s public farewell stuck in the middle of the homecoming is particularly contrived). Again, I hope it’s me, but the upbeat, thrilling, Danza Kuduro-infused coda to Fast Five - or the tense and promising cliffhanger of Fast & Furious - was conspicuous by its absence. Tying in Tokyo Drift and revealing Jason Statham as the Fast Seven antagonist was a bleak payoff by comparison.
I realise I must have sounded like an awfully grumpy bitch throughout, and have heaped all blame on the scriptwriters where some of it probably belongs to the actors and Justin Lin. In truth, Six has enough to recommend it; but unlike the better films in the saga, it does not stand well on its own - I don’t mean the need for prior knowledge to understand the plot, but the fact that Six's popularity (which I still hope it will enjoy) is likely to be owed to the franchise's, and particularly Five's, "reflected sunshine". I just hope that Seven is enough of a fun ride to make this one a worthy interim installment when viewed as part of the bigger picture. At least the wait is only a year this time ;)
PS [Naturally,] none of the above will stop me from watching it on the big screen a second time, just to check if I missed any interesting and/or slashy bits on the first viewing.
What did you think? Did you pick up more romance or bromance than I did in there? What do you see happening in Fast Seven, besides the already-telegraphed Tokyo race(s) involving Dom and the team squaring off with Statham? As a semi-wild guess, I'd suppose it would be largely based in Asia (ETA: just read about Vin Diesel saying it would be the Middle East instead - Dubai I suppose), bring back Hobbs again, and have Brian or Dom or Hobbs as a "damsel in distress" hostage/prisoner at some point; since they have already ticked that box with Mia and, in a way, with Letty in Six, and kidnapping baby Jack is, hopefully, too worn a cliche to be used. OK, they've already done it with Dom, too, at the end of F&F, but there is no such thing as too much goodness :P