Recensioni de* critic*

Fast & Furious is becoming less about its initial raison d'être and more about its familiar characters – which would be fine if those characters were rich enough to support a 130-minute movie. Alas, they're not. Vin (a limited actor) squints, Dwayne preens and meanwhile the black people – I'm sorry, there's no nice way to put it – offer comic relief.

Violence is boring. The great action movies are about life and the scramble to preserve it, no matter how or who or what threatens to take it away... "Fast 6" is solid entertainment, but it might have been great if it recognized that a human touch is a rare thing, and when you have it, there's no need to keep clenching it into a fist.

Lin has an eye for capturing speed, moving beyond the shaky cam and quick editing, and embracing large-scale sequences. Wisely not filmed in 3D, Fast 6‘s chases are sharply shot and increase exponentially in stakes and size, going from trucks, to tanks, to jumbo jets. Even when the plot revs down—and it does—Lin's camera doesn't, panning across rooms and in one sequence rotating around Dom and Letty during their moving reunion.

Director Justin Lin has been the franchise-runner since the third, "Tokyo Drift." Some sporadic overplotting suggests he's ready to move on. (Which he is; "Fast & Furious 7" will be handled by the guy who made "Saw," unaccountably.) But Lin frequently remembers to pummel us with awesome nonsense, none more awesomely nonsensical than a climax set on a runway evidently longer than some countries.

It's glorious while it lasts, but then the film goes back to figuring out how to keep its oversized vessel from taking on water. And that's more hard work than it's worth.

The large supporting cast—a liability in most action franchises—is one of Furious 6's assets; the movie emphasizes team action over solo heroics and group banter over one-liners... Furious 6's climactic showdown isn't staged mano a mano, but team vs. team, each member doing their part. It's the action-movie equivalent of K-Pop.

Director Justin Lin, who took over the series with the third release, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006), manages to imbue the material with Hawksian notions of masculinity, group dynamics, and moral authority even as he preserves the franchise's multicultural milieu and gleefully exaggerated action sequences.

Director Lin keeps all the fast-moving parts staggered, with various subplots and tangents gliding off and then looping back to the main action like an expertly engineered freeway. Its expanding repertoire of reprehensible ideologies may be shameful, but for a blockbuster vehicle designed to extract premium action from every gallon, F&F6 is far more fuel-efficient than any of the guzzlers it speeds toward chassis-crunching crashes.

None of it makes any sense, except within the high-octane logic of blowing stuff up onscreen. And, in case you're wondering, sometimes that can be entertainment enough: Slack-jawed euphoria shoots like nitro through the film.

It's not unreasonable to hope for a little consistency of tone. Don't show Johnson shoot a vending machine in the same manner as Chief Wiggum changing the TV channel, or Diesel defying the laws of physics, or a 150mph pursuit through apparently deserted London streets, then expect audiences to even shrug when one character betrays another, or an effectively anonymous supporting player loses his equally forgettable loved one.

Story has never been substantial to this franchise, its reputation having been built on the caliber of the gear (the Charger!) and the heedless pulse of the action sequences. Nevertheless, director Justin Lin, responsible for all but the first two installments, overruns his film(s) with talky stand-offs, forced comedic repartee, and overtly sentimental familial drama, none of which makes use of the essential narrative freedom that the series has, for better or worse, earned at this point.

With its puerile dialogue, daft performances, flat comic repartee and ear-rupturingly loud sound levels, the experience of watching ‘Fast & Furious 6' is like listening to death metal pour out of 500-watt speakers while being strapped to a pneumatic drill. Apart from Diesel's likeably mild-mannered persona, there's little here that we haven't seen before.