Over a brewski the other day I saw that 'Fast and Furious 6' was on the TeeVee so what the heck. I'd been nose deep in politics for too long, needed a break, and this was the cure- or so I thought.
Not having seen this particular installment of the series in the threater or on Netlix/Amazon/all the others (how could I have missed it?) I was a blank slate.
Now I know that Hollywood takes artistic license from time to time, especially with this series, and that in the prequel to 6, 'Fast Five', there had been this long, drawn out, and utterly ridiculous scene where the gang had been dragging a huge safe down the street with their cars. I should have been prepared, and I was, but even so I was quite taken aback, as if I had suddenly hit the nitrous oxide switch on my recliner, by the events that unfolded during the 'bridge scene' in F&F 6 as the improbabilities started accruing at a staggering rate.
Then, as if that weren't enough, at the end of the film came the 'plane scene' where so much craziness was going on that I couldn't keep track of it. Fortunately, though, others had taken these particular segments and put them on You Tube so that I was able to watch them in a view/pause/restart way where I was able to track what the hell had gone down and attempt to keep a rolling tally of the improbabilities.
There were far too many to list, really, which of course took the film deep into cartoon territory. In any movie audience's mind, during the watching of a film, when the first real life improbability hits there comes a collective sigh. An energy shift ripples throughout the theatre. The sense is that any actual tight drama could be as good as over and we might soon be resigned to watching Avengers, X Men, Star Trek, Transformers, or even Tom and Jerry- but there's still hope. After the second improbability, though, all hope is lost. We definitely know we're going there.
You have to wonder what the writing crew was thinking when they were storyboarding the bridge scene:
The bad guys are so bad that they're just driving over cars and SUV’s- in a tank.
A tank that is blasting at the roadway and overpasses, raining concrete down on drivers.
One of the good guys, BRIAN (Paul Walker), is magically able to use some rubble to launch his car into the other lanes of a four lane freeway, where the tank is driving into oncoming traffic.
Then ROMAN, another one of the good guys (the good guys of course having transported their cars from ops headquarters London to Spain, where this scene is taking place, 'cuz in vendetta/police support work money is no object) gets his Mustang trapped in front of the tank, which is steadily sawing parts of it off with it's tank treads but ROMAN just happens to have a winch(?) in his car. He grabs the cable from the winch, climbs atop the Mustang(!), wraps the cable around the tank's turret, then leaps off his car onto BRIAN'S car, which is paralleling the tank....
....but that's not all. Soon as he leaps off the Mustang the tank runs over the Mustang and flattens it, but the winch inside the flattened car is still attached to the cable and now the Mustang is being dragged behind the tank. BRIAN then gets behind the tank and repeatedly rams the mangled Mustang, in aims of knocking it over the railing of the long viaduct bridge the tank is driving over.
Meanwhile, inside the tank, good guy DOM TORETTO’S girlfriend LETTY is ordered out of the moving tank by the movie's super bad guy (SHAW) to unwrap the cable from the tank's turret so the tank can fire upon the good guys paralleling the tank in the lanes on the other side of the bridge. She complies(!) but 'round then BRIAN, on his third attempt, manages to knock the mangled Mustang over the bridge's railing. The Mustang plummets towards the ground far, far below but is brought up short 'cuz the cable isn't long enough. On the rebound the Mustang is gonna get hung up on some bridge superstructure for sure. DOM sees this and instantly calculates what needs to be done. Just as the Mustang snags on something below, the cable goes taut, the TANK lurches forward, and LETTY is flung into the air towards certain you know what DOM, having anticipated this, has already aimed his red hot rod towards the railing of the bridge. DOM'S car then impacts the bridge. He is flung into the air upon which he catches LETTY and, having more momentum than her, and perfect trajectory, sort of like a masterfully played billiards shot, DOM is able to land with his precious cargo 'softly' into the windshield of a crashed/parked car, which absorbs the impact nicely, DOM of course using his body to cushion the blow for LETTY.
We’ll be airborne soon…
Samuele Errico- Unsplash.com
WHEW!
High fives all around in the writer's room!
But we're just warmin' up here. The plane scene tops even this one, believe it or not (or else).
None the worse for wear after all this mayhem, the entire good guy contingent and bad guy contingent (plus a giant bruiser Russian guy surprise character- KLAUS) eventually converge in an utterly ridiculous ten minute or longer movie conclusion scene in which so frickin' much is going on that I have to again resort to You Tube to figure out what the hell happened (and measure it against the clock).
Apparently, this scene takes place on an airport runway so long you could land the space shuttle on it (and then some) 'cuz the giant Russian cargo plane in the scene flies over the characters racing down the runway in their vehicles, lands, takes off again... ...then crashes... ...well, you just have to see it.
Suffice it to say that my mental improbability meter exploded (along with the plane) during this scene and all I could wonder was how the actors had been able to maintain any sense of seriousness during the shooting of it but, if the paycheck is big enough, which it obviously was, everybody found it in them to play their part. The presence of Dwayne Johnson, aka 'The Rock' (Agent HOBBS in the film) I think helped tremendously. Seems to me he's always in on the joke.
By the time the movie was over I was checking the label on my beer to see if anything else was in there. Possibly hallucinogens.
As the credits rolled (briefly, there was a dire need for GEICO to pitch insurance) I wondered if the viewing public would ever again get the chance to watch a thoughtful movie, one where a punch to the face really frickin' hurts, a spin kick to the jaw puts a person instantly out of commission, a machine gun easily hits a target less than fifty yards away, and where guys racing through town to get away don't get far 'cuz there's something in the way called traffic that you can’t drive over but I think those days are over as evidenced by Furious 6 and many, many others I've seen like it. The money these days is on rampant, unbelievable excess, so much non-stop action that it stuns you, glazes your eyes over, and seriously hurts your head.
You know, I like to 'escape to the movies', just like everybody else. Just didn't think I'd be asked to totally escape from reality! Can you guys give us a warning in the trailer or something that we're goin' there? I hate getting sucker punched this bad but what else can a movie viewer do? There's no upside down R movie rating (yet) that denotes we're gonna be leaving reality far, far behind.
Guess when it comes to reality-based entertainment I’ll have to write the ultimate thriller screenplay then, and hope that somebody (or a lot of somebodys) does too, our shared goal being making movies that ride the knife edge between probable and improbable so deftly our audiences can't help but acutely feel what the characters are going through. These will be the alternatives to what we're deluged with these days, movies that turn into cartoons, all audience involvement vaporized, and viewers only unthinking mute mannequins staring at flashing images.
But writers, actors, and producers follow the money trail, you know. If there was a market for thoughtful fare it would be being filled. Truth is, even though The Fast and Furious series has been entirely improbable the one thing that’s factual about it
is it has made a ton of money.
So- grab a beer or two and buckle up. More is coming, I’m sure of it.