Oh Shit! They've Got a Tank! Or Fast & Furious 6 is Silly, Fun

Wrong team, bitch!

Michelle Rodriguez is a tough, minimalist, no nonsense actress. That makes her perfect for a Fast and Furious franchise that never stops throwing nonsense at her as Letty Ortiz, the badass wife, soulmate and Dom Toretto’s partner in both crime AND crime-fighting. 

Rodriguez’s speed-loving badass sure seemed to die at the beginning of 2009’s Fast & Furious. Thankfully in the world of The Fast and the Furious death is less a permanent end than a temporary roadblock. 

During a mid-credit sequence in Fast Five we learn that rumors of Letty’s violent demise have been greatly exaggerated and that she is now part of a powerful criminal organization in Europe. 

Fast & Furious 6 brings Rodriguez back to the franchise in a big way through the kind of hilariously histrionic plot devices you might see on The Days of Our Lives. 

Letty Ortiz did not die, as we had been led to believe. Instead she developed a narratively convenient case of Amnesia that made her forget who she was and what she believed in. 

The confused master criminal is consequently ideal prey for Owen Shaw (Luke Evans), a sociopathic British mercenary who recruits the forgetful drag racer to join a team that, as Tyrese’s Roman observes, functions as sort of a bizarro world version of Dominic and Brian’s hand-picked family of drag racers turned world-saving superheroes. 

It’s a little like that episode of Seinfeld where Elaine finds a friend group full of weird doubles for her buddies except that they’re all nice, good people instead of selfish monsters. 

The Fast and the Furious movies are fond of doubles. Vin Diesel’s Dominic Toretto and Dwayne Johnson’s Luke Hobbs sometimes seem to be variations on the same impossibly jacked, hyper-macho action hero. Also, they both look like muscle-bound sentient penises. I don’t mean that in a negative way. They both have a very specific look and vibe  that the other, weirdly, ALSO has. 

Diesel and Johnson are a LOT alike. That’s why they hate each other and also why Johnson has gone from being one of the most universally loved celebrities in pop culture to a guy whose colossal ego increasingly gets him into trouble. 

Also like Diesel, Johnson decided that he was too damn big for one of the biggest franchises in film history and announced that he would not be returning for the last two films in the series. 

In the kind of messy social media drama you would expect from two multi-millionaires who could probably murder you with their fists, Diesel asked Johnson to return to the franchise on Instagram, writing emotionally, “My little brother Dwayne... the time has come. The world awaits the finale of Fast 10. As you know, my children refer to you as Uncle Dwayne in my house. There is not a holiday that goes by that they and you don’t send well wishes... but the time has come. Legacy awaits.”

Johnson responded harshly to Diesel’s words during an interview on CNN, stating forthrightly, “Vin's recent public post was an example of his manipulation. I didn't like that he brought up his children in the post, as well as Paul Walker's death. Leave them out of it. We had spoken months ago about this and came to a clear understanding. My goal all along was to end my amazing journey with this incredible 'Fast & Furious' franchise with gratitude and grace. It's unfortunate that this public dialogue has muddied the waters.”

Damn! That is cold-blooded. Then again one of the many things that makes The Fast and the Furious franchise so weirdly fascinating is the way the film’s behind-the-scenes drama reflects the onscreen action. 

If I might use a perhaps overused word, Walker and Diesel were more than just co-stars. They were family. Onscreen and off they were best bros whose legacies were inextricably intertwined so when Walker died in a car accident Diesel played a role similar to the one Puff Daddy played when Notorious B.I.G. was killed. 

Puff Daddy was Notorious B.I.G’s unofficial official mourner, the mega-famous celebrity who made his friendship with B.I.G the core of his brand and his persona. When the legendary rapper died Puff Daddy became the carrier of his flame.

Diesel occupies a similar role with Walker but, needless to say, that does not seem to impress Johnson. 

The Corona-loving drag racer is the patriarch of the Fast and the Furious family but in Fast & Furious 6 it’s Johnson’s Luke Shaw who needs Dom and his team to help him bring down Owen Shaw and his crew. 

Dom says yes on the condition that they all be granted pardons so that they can someday return home and stop running, international nomads who go wherever work takes them. 

Dom and Owen’s families learn as much as they can about each other so that they can have the all-important psychological advantage. 

Gal Gadot returns as former Mossad agent Gisele Yashar, a daredevil speed demon and the girlfriend of Han Lue I (Sung Kang). 

In The Fast and the Furious Dom and Brian were super drag racers. Then the franchise got much bigger, much sillier and much more global and they evolved into super spies. 

By Fast & Furious 6 the family had become superheroes. They fly through the air! The laws of gravity no longer apply to them! They do things that would result in the violent, agonizing deaths of non-meta-humans pretty much every scene! They all possess genius-level IQs, the driving skills of NASCAR professionals and can fight like MMA champions. 

When Gadot went from playing Gisele in the Fast and the Furious movies to starring as Wonder Woman in the 2017 blockbuster it represented a lateral movie because Gadot is already playing someone with superhuman abilities.

Even when a member of the family dies here there’s a pretty good chance that it won’t take and that they’ll return from the dead none the worse for wear, also like a superhero. 

Fast & Furious 6 is all about escalation, about taking something that is almost impossibly outsized and cartoonish to begin with and blowing it up into something even more gloriously preposterous.

The budget, scope and cornball ambition are all bigger as are the vehicles. In an adrenaline-pumping set-pieces that raises the stakes considerably the bad guys commandeer a motherfucking TANK. 

Evans does not make for a particularly memorable villain but there’s nevertheless tremendously satisfying about watching this maniac destroy everything in his wake with child-like joy and total abandon. 

It’s just so gloriously destructive, so thoroughly, completely and homicidally anti-social. He’s like a psychotic little boy gleefully smashing his toys. 

Fast and Furious 6 is all about macho spectacle wedded to equally manly melodrama about the bonds of family and large men who love each other deeply. 

If I might return to the theme of the offscreen action in Fast & Furious 6 echoing the onscreen action, Gina Carano costars here as Riley Hicks, an agent Luke Hobbs chooses to work with because she seems tough and capable. 

The good folks over at Lucasfilms felt the same way. That’s why they wanted to work with her. 

It’s all a goddamn lie, however. Riley is a turncoat secretly working against our heroes and for the bad guys. 

That’s right: in this Fast and the Furious movie Gina Carano goes against the family. 

Big mistake! 

In a line rich with meta-textual relevance Michelle Rodriguez’s parting lines to Riley is “Wrong team, bitch!” 

That was also what the Hollywood establishment told Carano when she very publicly chose to ally herself with the team her new benefactor Ben Shapiro is on, along with folks like Donald Trump Jr., Kevin Sorbo and Kirk Cameron, AKA some of the worst people in the world. 

Thankfully the all-important family remains on the right side of history/appropriately apolitical and Fast & Furious 6 is big, dumb and a stupid amount of fun.