Picoreview: Fast & Furious 6

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Picoreview: Fast & Furious 6 does what it says on the tin.

I won tickets to see a preview and Ted, who is a most excellent husband, told me to go ahead and go, despite the impracticalities thereof. So I wrangled up a friend and we went.

It is a completely ridiculous movie. There are moments of inhuman feats so outrageous one wonders when Vin & Crew got the Superhero upgrade. There are two epic lady fights. There are fast cars. There are explosions.

There are basically two white dudes in the movie, and one of them is the bad guy.

This, really, is the true reason I love the F&F franchise. I mean, the fact that Vin Diesel’s voice registers at the same frequency my hormones do doesn’t hurt, but I love these movies mostly because they’ve got the most diverse and interesting casts of anything I’ve ever seen out of Hollywood. In the last movie there were perhaps technically three white guys, but one of them had a beard to his eye sockets, making his ethnicity appear to be Caveman. The rest of the leads in this one are Vin and The Rock, whose ethnic backgrounds strike me as flat-out melting-pot American, two black guys, an Israeli woman, three Hispanic women, Gina Carano whose ancestry qualifies her strongly for Wonder Woman but I have no idea what it actually is (some smattering of Italian, she says, but beyond that, look, if she wants to say Amazon, I ain’t gonna argue with her) and a Korean dude. They look (aside from being unusually beautiful, but let’s not get hung up on that) like a bunch of people you’d see inside of half a city block in New York or San Francisco. It’s like a miracle of God, and in 2013, I feel like I shouldn’t have to be so delighted that this wee little miracle has occurred. The F&F movies are the only films out there that appear to be aimed at the mainstream white audience and yet dare to have a wide range of ethnic diversity in them, and I do not understand why more studios aren’t going ‘Oh look, this works.’ But I’ll keep going to F&F movies until Vin and I are both a hundred and five, as long as they keep giving me characters and faces that challenge the mainstream.

And then on *top* of that, they rate stupendously well in Female Leads Who Kick Ass, which they took that to a whole new level in this one. There are five women of note in this (against 7 men of note, which I think is pretty flipping awesome all by itself), and every one of them does something important. Some of those important things aren’t as over the top or dramatic as, well, okay, pretty much all the shit the guys go through, but even so, not one of them is relegated wholesale to Helpless Female Lead. And not once in the entire series have any of the women been so relegated, not even with Letty’s ashes-bitter death.

So in a nutshell: fucking awesome. Moments that made me laugh. Moments that made me gasp. A storyline that kinda didn’t go where I wanted it to, but wasn’t badly handled. Overall, for the win.

Stay through the first credits run, because there’s a teaser clip after a minute or two.

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