Fast & Furious 6

Fast and Furious 6 had the unenviable task of following up the enormously successful Fast Five, the entry that not only revitalized the series but also brought it some of the best reviews they had ever had. While it isn't quite as successful as Fast Five, it's still a lot of fun.

Brian (played by Paul Walker) and Dom (played by Vin Diesel) are once again called into action Special Agent Luke Hobbs (played by Dwayne Johnson) to help him catch a dangerous mercenary Owen Shaw (played by Luke Evans) and his gang. What entices Dom and Brian to join is the revelation that a member of the gang is Dom's thought to be dead girlfriend Letty (played by Michelle Rodriguez). Soon after, they set about reuniting their team for another adventure, bringing in Han (played by Sung Kang), Giselle (played by Gal Gadot), Roman (played by Tyrese Gibson) and Tej (played by Chris "Ludacris" Bridges). To get them on board with the new mission, they ask in reward the whole crew gets full pardons for their past misdeeds, to which Hobbs begrudgingly agrees. 

Settling in London, the group takes on the task of tracking down the elusive Shaw and try to apprehend him and his gang while rescuing an amnesiac Letty. I really liked how this one mixed up the characters into interesting pairs, partnering motormouth Roman with quiet Han or Tej with Hobbs and letting the different personalities play off one another making for some very entertaining and amusing moments.  

The film also ups the action sequences even higher than the last film (no easy task), with a car chase involving a tank versus several cars, numerous explosions and some spectacular (as well as spectacularly implausible) stunts, namely Dom launching himself out of his car to catch a falling Letty in midair and then the both of them smash into another car only to walk away from it. The climax of the film has all the members of the main crew coming together in trying to keep a massive cargo plane with Shaw and his crew on it from taking off from what has to be the world's longest runway. 

Fast and Furious 6 is where the series fully and completely becomes unabashedly and shamelessly ridiculous. At this point, the series has more retroactive continuity than Marvel Comics (well, maybe not, but it's getting there) with resurrecting Letty and then in the post credit's scene reworking Han's fatal car crash from Tokyo Drift. That's right, the timeline has finally sorted itself out with this series, even though I was more than a little sad to see Han go again (he's my favorite character in the series, okay?). But it also owns that ridiculousness and makes it part of the film. It never takes itself too seriously and because of that, you still remain with it somehow. You know what you're watching it silly and beyond implausible, but since the movie knows it too it somehow works. That's the charm of these movies, at least for me.   

While this one was no Fast Five, it was still a solid follow-up with the addition of, perhaps for the first time in this series, a genuine and threatening villain Fast and Furious 6 is a worthwhile and entertaining follow up in a series that just keeps getting bigger and more audacious as it goes along.