Fast & Furious 6 (2013)

FF returns with twice the heists and twice the outrageousness

We’ve noted how Justin Lin put a racing car franchise through a blender to make a heist action film in Fast Five. The sequel, again helmed by Lin, reprises the heist theme by pitting two heist teams against each other, again with the cops working and knocking heads with the good crooks.

This round, Toretto’s comically efficient and zany team comes up against their scarily superior Mirror Universe counterparts. They’re big boys playing in the big leagues, hijacking military transports and breaking into bases to sell WMDs to the highest bidders, using the same team of specialists template that Lin re-introduced from heist films in Fast Five. In fact, after one character makes a snarky comment about the Team Shaw being an evil expy of Team Toretto, I was expecting Fast & Furious 6 to be a double heist film – in that we’ll see how well Team Shaw gels together and works together, beats the crap out of Team Toretto, and challenges them to better their game so they can out-heist the big boys.

I may have expected too much from Justin Lin (direction) and Chris Morgan (script). The gap in between the production of the two films was clearly insufficient for both to identify the weaknesses and refine the strengths of the previous film. Consequently, we’re still stuck with the unintentionally bad dialogue and vague gesturing towards the heist genre while Lin and Morgan deliver their ambitious and consistently paced action choreography.

While Justin Lin seems to have found a stable footing for the Fast/Furious franchise, delivering outrageously mind-blowing sequences that a Michael Bay would deliver if he deigned to touch a racing car show, one has the feeling there are greater heights the franchise could achieve – and that James Wan, the director appointed by Paramount for FF7, had better deliver.