{"id":23637,"date":"2013-05-27T19:52:04","date_gmt":"2013-05-27T23:52:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/?p=23637"},"modified":"2013-05-27T19:52:04","modified_gmt":"2013-05-27T23:52:04","slug":"fast-furious-6","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/2013\/05\/fast-furious-6\/","title":{"rendered":"Fast & Furious 6"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Bob Garver<\/p>\n

\"\"\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The \u201cFast & Furious\u201d franchise is one that does better and better, or \u201cgains speed\u201d so to speak, with each new installment. No longer content to dominate a lame movie month like April, \u201cFast & Furious 6\u201d is taking over the Memorial Day weekend box office and surely becoming one of the biggest hits of the year. The films themselves have never been that great \u2013 they\u2019re heavy on car chases, bad jokes, and explosions \u2013 but they always make for a great party in the theater. It\u2019s hard to deny that the new film makes for the greatest party yet.<\/p>\n

2011\u2019s \u201cFast Five\u201d was like a convention of characters from the somewhat disjointed first four installments. Almost all of your favorites are back again. There\u2019s streetcar king Dominic Turetto (franchise face Vin Diesel), cop-turned-criminal Brian O\u2019Conner (Paul Walker), government agent Luke Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson), comic relief driver Roman (Tyrese Gibson), comic relief techie Tej (Chris \u201cLudacris\u201d Bridges), doomed Tokyo driver Han (Sung Kang) and his girlfriend Giselle (Gal Godot). We\u2019re missing Eva Mendes\u2019s federal agent, but another agent played by MMA star Gina Carano is shoehorned into the group to make up for it. Returning to the franchise is Letty (Michelle Rodriguez), Dom\u2019s girlfriend who was \u201ckilled\u201d in the fourth movie. Yes, they explain her re-emergence with the old \u201cyou saw an explosion, not a body\u201d plot device.<\/p>\n

These movies have never been big on storyline, but the one we get here is that Dom gets the team together to take down terrorist Owen Shaw (Luke Evans). The team participates mostly in order to get pardoned by Hobbs for their past crimes, but Dom does it to pursue Letty, who for some reason is working for Shaw. Of course, most of Shaw\u2019s operations are vehicle-based, and we get action scenes involving cars, trucks, a tank, an airplane, and a nifty little go-cart thingy. The action scenes are exciting and improbable as always, but they\u2019re hard to follow. During the climactic airplane scene, I couldn\u2019t keep track of who was on the ground, on the plane, or somewhere in between (there were, in fact, quite a few in between). I blame it on the huge cast, the movie doesn\u2019t want you to forget all the characters that are a part of the sequence, so it has to keep jumping around between them.<\/p>\n

The film, like many blockbusters, contains a scene after the first few end credits that sets up the next movie. The film uses this type of scene as wisely as any I\u2019ve ever seen. The scene takes us back to an earlier release in the franchise that purists will tell you actually takes place after the events of this film. This means that we\u2019re finally caught up chronologically, so all bets are off when it comes to who survives the next movie. This movie does sacrifice some suspense since we know that certain characters have to survive the majority of the film to make it to this scene. The scene also sets up the villain for the next installment, and it\u2019s a doozie.<\/p>\n

\u201cFast & Furious 6\u201d isn\u2019t going to win over anybody who doesn\u2019t like the franchise. Nor can I imagine many people liking it if they\u2019re unfamiliar with the rest of the series (people like me get to take the rapid character introductions for granted, newcomers may find them confusing). But the film has a huge built-in audience, and they all seemed to get a kick out of it. This franchise isn\u2019t running out of gas anytime soon. One can only imagine how great the party will be when the seventh film rolls around.<\/p>\n

Two Stars out of Five.<\/p>\n

\u201cFast & Furious 6\u201d is rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action and mayhem throughout, some sexuality and language. Its running time is 130 minutes.<\/p>\n

Contact Bob Garver at rrg251@nyu.edu<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Bob Garver \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The \u201cFast & Furious\u201d franchise is one that does better and better, or \u201cgains speed\u201d so to speak, with each new installment. No longer content to… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[108],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23637"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23637"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23637\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23637"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23637"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23637"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}