Souped-up: FURIOUS 6

The Fast & Furious movies are some kind of modern Hollywood wonder: a scrappy franchise built improbably out of humble B-movie origins into one of the most popular and most reliably entertaining series currently running. From its origin in 2001 as a modest B-movie that was an appealing reworking of Point Break that swapped SoCal surfing for street racing, through two largely free-standing follow-ups that drifted away from the central premise, the series has shown a resilient capacity for trial and error and confident course correction. Producer Neal H. Moritz, who has been around since the beginning, and director Justin Lin, who has made four of these in a row now, have been unafraid to try new things – new locales, new characters, new hooks – while keeping what works and ditching what doesn’t. The series finally hit upon the exact right combination with 2011’s Fast Five, a satisfying fast car spectacle of a heist picture that pulled in all the best aspects of the previous four films to casually create the kind of multi-picture mythology Marvel worked so hard to build leading up to The Avengers. It’s all the more appealing for feeling serendipitous, the product of continual underdog status.

The franchise’s growth continues in Furious 6, which is once again bigger and better than anything that’s come before. The series has been honed once again. This time the exposition is tighter, the emotional arcs are crisper, and the action set pieces are more outrageous and insanely gripping. The plot’s as ludicrous as ever, but it makes perfect sense on its own terms. The single-minded agent played by Dwayne Johnson, sweat and muscle personified, hunts a crew of drivers led by a mysterious new villain (Luke Evans) and a mysteriously returning face (Michelle Rodriguez), striking military targets throughout Europe. He decides the only people who can help him capture these bad guys are the very drivers who stole a massive safe out from under his watch in Rio and who he’s sworn to bring to justice. He seeks out their leader (Vin Diesel) and offers to wipe the criminal records clean if he’ll get the gang back together to help Interpol stop these villains. It takes a team of drivers to stop a team of drivers, or so the logic of these movies goes.

Diesel agrees, and so the whole family of series regulars – Paul Walker, Jordana Brewster, Tyrese Gibson, Ludacris, Sung Kang, and Gal Gadot – comes flying in from all corners of the world to participate in this globetrotting film in which the good guys chase the bad guys through sensational sequences of vehicular mayhem. New to the group is Johnson’s second-in-command, played by Haywire’s Gina Carano, proving in only her second major role that she’s the best action star on the planet. She’s just as hyper-competent and self-assured as the cast, which otherwise joins the chase already crackling with charming chemistry carried over from last time. The group has grown to be terrifically appealing and refreshingly causally diverse. And they’re easy to root for. It’s funny how a series in which all of the leads are so very good at their jobs (and progressively richer for it) can maintain their underdog status. But that’s a key to the films’ success. There’s always a sense that they’re one wrong step away from prison and one wrong turn of the wheel away from death. Keeping Johnson close this time is a good way to keep the threat of the law alive, while Evans provides the most purely threatening villain the series has had yet.

As screenwriter Chris Morgan studiously finds the series loose plot threads that I hadn’t realized existed, pulling the whole initially haphazard enterprise into something of a beautifully retconned coherence, director Lin offers up scenes like an early chase through London streets in which the bad guys have souped-up racecars built with angled armored plates that allow them to hit a police car head on and send it spinning through the air while they zoom away unscathed. It’s an encouraging sign that six movies in there are still new fun, exciting ways to send cars smashing. Later, a spectacular sequence will grow to include helicopters, motorcycles, and one tough tank. And if you thought Fast Five’s extended sequence of two cars dragging a two-ton safe through city streets was something, wait until you see what happens with a cargo plane here! Just when I thought the film was stalling out, it finds another gear. I shouldn’t have doubted.

I haven’t always liked this franchise. It first appeared when I wrongly thought its car chase simplicity was beneath my burgeoning cinephilia, but Fast Five was so entertaining it prompted me to revisit them all in the run up to Furious 6. Doing so, my opinion of them improved (somewhat) and served to reinforce how successfully the filmmakers responsible have gotten the potential out of even the lowest points of the franchise – for me the dull, table-clearing and setting fourth effort – and pulled it all together into a coherent whole. The series has only ever promised dumb fun with fast cars and some minor cops-and-robbers intrigue. Now that it has figured out how to deliver all that as well as gripping heist plotting, satisfying fan-service, unexpectedly emotional arcs, bruising hand-to-hand combat, and gleefully, absurdly, joyfully over-the-top action, I figure this series is downright unstoppable. Furious 6 is not only the best one yet, it’s sequence for sequence up there with the most enjoyable action movies in recent memory.

Note: Be sure to stick around for the rewarding scene in the middle of the end credits that features a killer surprise cameo and a tease of more Fast & Furious to come.

Misfire: BULLET TO THE HEAD

A trigger-happy shoot-‘em-up that also happens to be casually racist towards its second lead and boring as all get-out, Bullet to the Head represents a sad attempt at recapturing former action star glory for star Sylvester Stallone. The pieces are here for a fine R-rated actioner with often dependable B-movie stylist Walter Hill in the director’s chair and a good enough premise involving an evil developer (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) who wants to bulldoze a slum to put up condominiums and somehow that involves hiring a hit man (Stallone) and then a second hit man (Jason Momoa) to double cross the first one and then a semi-rogue cop (Sung Kang) from out of town shows up to investigate and Christian Slater’s hanging around the villains for some reason. But hold on. I’m already getting ahead of myself by plunging right into the simplistic confusion of the plot. What you really want to know right off the bat is if it’s worth trudging to your nearest multiplex, through a blizzard in all likelihood, simply to catch a glimpse of Stallone’s action movie presence in a non-Expendables form. The answer is no.

When I showed up for a matinee over the weekend, the only other people in the theater were two older guys sitting in the back row. While I sat near the front, waiting for the trailers to start, I heard them talking.

Guy 1: I wonder why there aren’t more people here?

Guy 2: It’s ‘cause Stallone isn’t too popular anymore. Now it’s all about The Rock.

Guy 1: The Rock?

Guy 2: Yeah, Dwayne Johnson.

Guy 1: Oh, the Rock!

Guy 2: Yeah, and Jason Statham, too.

So, there you have it. That’s the state of the modern action star in a nutshell. There are the younger guys (relatively speaking) who get by on their charisma and the occasional good script. And then there’s the old guys trying to make movies that comment ever so slightly on their age while still allowing them to go around kicking just as much butt as they used to. Just a couple weeks ago there was 65-year-old Schwarzenegger as the nearly retired sheriff in The Last Stand who, when kicked through the glass door of a bar, answered a “How are you?” with “Old.” Now in Bullet to the Head, 66-year-old Stallone holds a gun on a man and asks to settle their disagreement quickly because “my arm’s getting tired.” It’s a nice wink to reality, I suppose, as is the scene where the interloping cop ogles a tattoo artist (Sarah Shahi) and mentions her looks to the old man who responds, “She’s my daughter.”

Endless expository dialogue like that gem makes up most of the scenes. Hill fills the New Orleans-set film with local color atmospherics, joylessly bloody violence, and executes every dull twist of Alessandro Camon’s script with sturdy professionalism that does nothing to bring any interest as it slowly and inevitably crawls from one predictable beat to the next. It is as lumbering an anachronism as Stallone himself, a gravely, stiff attempt to revive a sort of slicked back, pumped up, flippantly bombastic violence machine of a movie of a kind that was none too enjoyable in the first place. The Expendables movies manage to more or less pull off this trick by A) inviting the next generation (Statham, Hemsworth, Adkins) to join the macho 80’s reunion and B) having a decent sense of how silly the whole thing is in the first place.

Bullet to the Head is self-serious blunt force cheese that follows its lead’s lead, a character who grimly shoots down anyone and everyone who is a threat or who has wronged him, always knowing the right place to go, always a step ahead, and always acting like a jerk about it. He’s constantly firing condescending, usually racist, remarks at Kang as punchline punctuations. He’s constantly cruel and we’re supposed to cheer. After blasting away a helpless captive, Kang says that one isn’t to do stuff like that. Stallone’s response? “I just did.” It’s not funny, but also not surprising. But in a movie with so much backwards, reductive, dusty dumbness to rankle and irritate, its biggest crime is how boring and predictable it is. I went into the theater wide awake in the middle of the day and I soon felt myself wishing I could take a nap and wake up after the movie was over. It would’ve been a more productive use of my time.

Vroom Vroom: FAST FIVE

I don’t recall enjoying any of the previous Fast and the Furious movies, those four oddly named films that provided an excuse for fast cars and manly scowls. But still I showed up at Fast Five with something close to anticipation for I’ve found that this is the rare franchise that can get me kind of excited each time around, as if all those hours spent gazing in apathy at cars zooming around in their dumb little plots were somehow not as bad as I remember. At this point, ten years removed from the first movie, I’m starting to think I should rewatch them all to see if I’d like them any better now. What strange effect the allure of these movies has on my memory and judgment.

It is to my surprise, then, that I didn’t altogether dislike Fast Five. Director Justin Lin (working from a script by Chris Morgan) does a good job of juggling the massive, bloated 130-minute runtime by staging some exciting action sequences and not lingering all too long on the labyrinthine character histories. I thought I was in trouble, though, just a few minutes in. I’m not up on the ins and outs of the Fast and Furious mythology. I couldn’t tell you in too great of detail what even happened in some of the installments let alone how exactly all the characters know each other. When the movie opens with Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) sentenced to prison and promptly escaping with the help of his sister (Jordana Brewster) and her boyfriend (Paul Walker) and then follows that up with a lot of talk about events past, I had a hard time keeping up. Soon enough, though, the movie swept me up in its preposterousness when a car is pulled out of a moving train and speeds across the desert.

Of course, Fast Five is about paying off the fans’ knowledge of the series and about bringing back as many characters from old installments as possible. It kind of feels like a reunion with personalities I didn’t even know I missed because I didn’t think they were enjoyable the first time. In every scene it’s clear that this is a movie that likes its characters as much as I'd imagine fans do (part of what makes me a bit curious to revisit the earlier movies). After a long-winded first act, the movie introduces the need to bring in Tyrese Gibson and Ludacris (unseen since 2 Fast 2 Furious), Sung Kang (from Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift) and Gal Gadot (from Fast & Furious) to help with that hoary old criminal plot: the “one last job.” Yes, after four movies of flirting with a heist plot, Fast Five just goes right on ahead and commits to it. That’s just what this series has been looking for all this time.

Despite the large ensemble, this isn’t about the people. It’s about the plot. It hardly matters who the participants are. As one character says to another, about an upcoming robbery, “I need an extra body.” This isn’t a movie about character; really, this is a movie about careening, about bodies in motion, spinning vehicles and live ammunition down city streets. It’s about slamming through ridiculous close calls and making tight, fast turns through narrow spaces, about pulling off daring robberies in broad daylight with maximum destruction but minimal collateral damage. I kid! With a movie this fast and furious there’s nothing minimal about it, especially when, in its climactic slam-bang heist, two cars are dragging a ten-ton safe down a busy street in the middle of Rio de Janeiro.

Where the movie most succeeds, in my estimation, is its introduction of Dwayne Johnson, continuing his long-awaited reentering into the action genre after last fall’s surprisingly entertaining – and bluntly efficient – Faster (no relation to this series). His blocky, muscled charisma is channeled into an all-business roughness and gruff determination playing a law-enforcement agent who arrives in Rio on Toretto’s trail. He’s a sweaty, hulking piece of overheated machismo that moves right up to the precipice of parody without falling over. (When Johnson and Diesel finally clash in a battle of the sweaty muscles, its some kind of tough-guy showdown that feels much sprightlier than, say, last year’s wax museum of Stallone’s Expendables).

Johnson commands a group of indistinguishable underlings just as effortlessly as he commands the screen. He makes the most out of every line given to him in a movie where most characters are lucky when they get more than a dozen words to say at any one time. In fact, he seems to be the only character that knows just how much sense the movie makes. “You know what makes sense?” he asks an inquisitive underling. To answer his own question, he rips the case files out of her hand and tosses them to the floor.

Even though I found much to enjoy, I still felt like I was sitting at a remove from the movie. I admired the stunt work and the general air of straight-faced ridiculousness, and the last twenty or thirty minutes or so are a nice piece of sustained action filmmaking, but I never really felt completely comfortable. Maybe because it was building on a foundation that was mostly forgotten to me, or maybe because it’s strange tone (its very somber about its silliness) was so weirdly wobbly I never fell into the right groove. Still, I had my pulse raised or a goofy smile provoked (sometimes both at once) just enough times that I can’t be too hard on it.