Dwayne Johnson's raging nice guy

 

     Generally, I'm interested in movies that explore worlds that are unfamiliar to me. That inclination made me eager to see director Benny Safdie's The Smashing Machine, a look at the early days of UFC full-contact fighting as told through the story of former champion Mark Kerr.

   UFC's current popularity aside, the movie's big selling point involves the performance of Dwayne Johnson, who has been made unrecognizable thanks to prosthetic face makeup, fake teeth, and a short crop of curly dark hair. Muscular and hulking, Johnson's Kerr might be mistaken for a Marvel character in search of a series.

   Johnson's natural likability underlies the contradiction that makes his performance intriguing. Often displaying Boy Scout-like politeness, Kerr seems like a nice guy, but he's unremitting in the ring where he unleashes his inner beast and, if necessary, beats opponents to a pulp. 

   Taking place from 1997 to 2000, the story deals with the days before UFC fighting entered the mega-money sweepstakes. Kerr eventually sets his sights on a 2000 championship bout in Japan. The payoff: $200,000 to the winner of a bruising tournament. 

    Interestingly, the characters refer to $200,000 as life-changing money, chump change in today's athletic environment.

   The movie begins with an undefeated Kerr taking on challengers in Brazil. A subsequent bout in Japan results in a crushing "no-contest" decision due to an opponent's foul. What Kerr sees as a devastating  failure brings him face-to-face with his addiction to pain-killers and performance enhancing drugs.

  Out of the ring, the film slips. Safdie chart's Kerr's stormy relationship with Dawn (Emily Blunt), a woman who becomes a bit of a Delilah figure for Kerr's Sampson. He accuses her of interfering with his need to intensify his focus during training, and the movie sometimes feels like a watered-down version of Raging Bull.

    Numerous fight scenes left me gasping at how much pain was being inflicted: heads slammed against canvases, knees bashing torsos, and faces pummeled by jack-hammer blows.

    Given the demands of ring life, it's hardly surprising that Kerr finds his closest relationship with fellow fighter Mark Coleman, played by Ryan Bader, himself a former UFC fighter. Another former fighter, Bas Rutten, helps prepare Kerr for a second try at the championship. All of these guys share what they might call "warrior love."

     Smashing Machine covers too short a period of time to be considered a full-fledged biopic. Heavy make-up also comes with a price: At times, I found myself distracted searching for traces of Johnson under his heavy makeup.

      Skimpy on psychological probing, the movie offers a face-value view of Kerr's motivation. Winning brings the highest of highs, the charge of victory that can't be duplicated elsewhere, Kerr says. There's a cruel if obvious irony to be found here, as well: If victory is the highest of highs, defeat becomes the lowest of lows.

     A rudimentary look at UFC fighting, Smashing Machine might have benefited from some perspective about the society that idolizes these modern-day gladiators.

    Enough said -- at least for me. Johnson stamps his signature on a real-life figure, providing Kerr with bulk that threatens to burst through the screen, but this tightly wound slice of a battler's life never quite finds a larger point to make.

      

 

 

Lots of commotion, too few thrills

   

   Dwayne Johnson finds a superpower showcase in Black Adam, the latest entry into the DC Comics Universe. Johnson plays a character with superpowers but his Adam also has a vengeful side, which is supposed to make him more interesting — at least on paper.

   A noise machine built around a flood of unimpressive action, the movie features many battles in which bolts of lightning shoot from the fingertips of heroes and villains. There's enough zapping here to run a zillion microwaves but none of it has much real charge.

   A prologue explains how Adam acquired his superpowers by taking us back the ancient kingdom of Kahndaq where an enslaved Adam loses his wife and young son and finds himself in a state of suspended animation (or something like it) for 5,000 years. 

   Thanks to Adrianna (Sarah Shahi) Adam is revived in present-day Kahndaq,  a Middle Eastern-style country that is being invaded by militaristic thugs. The people of Kahndaq are not free.

   Adrianna comes into possession of a crown (well, it had to be something) that everyone else in the movie seems to want. Why not? It's made of Eternium. Ah, you say, that explains everything.

  Later, Adrianna’s son Amon (Bohdi Sabongui) will be kidnapped and Adrianna will implore Adam to help rescue the kid.

   Another story intersects with Adam’s. Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) wants to combat Adam by assembling a special team dubbed The Justice Society. Calling this four-member group a "society" stretches the term, but I guess Justice Quartet would impose too severe a limit on future growth.

   Society members include Hawkman (Aldis Hodge), Doctor Fate (Pierce Brosnan), Cyclone (Quintessa Swindell) and Atom Smasher (Noah Centineo). An idiosyncratic array of powers, none of them especially intriguing, is distributed throughout the group.

    Toward the end, the movie goes sentimental over the friendship between Hawkman and the self-sacrificing Doctor Fate. My heart strings remained unplucked.  

    Adam, who flies but more often seems to float like a balloon in a Thanksgiving day parade, wants revenge for the murder of his wife and son five millennia ago.  Say this: The man knows how to hold a grudge.

   The only looming question: Will Adam unite with the Justice Society to help save Amon, presumably so that the kid can continue skate boarding through Kahndaq’s deteriorating streets?

   The future of a free Khandaq may also hang in the bargain.

   Not enough? Eventually, a character called Sabbac  (Marwan Kenzari) emerges to lead the legions of hell against …well … just about everyone. 

    Oh well, I liked the name. Sabbac has ring to it, don’t you think? 

    The movie makes attempts at humor but they are, for the most part, just that: attempts.

     To make the already obvious even clearer, the movie uses the Rolling Stones’ Paint it Black to underline some of the clangorous action. 

      Director Jaume Collet-Serra’s best bit arrives in a postscript that involves a surprise appearance. Talk about too little too late.

    Will there be more Black Adam movies? I don't know but it might be best to say Shazam and hope for the best.

    And if you don’t know about Shazam, don’t worry. You’ll probably be doing something else this weekend anyway.

'Jungle Cruise' loads up on action

   I'm skeptical about movies developed from theme park rides and Jungle Cruise did nothing to change my mind. But, hey, I’m realistic enough to know that such opposition only results in lost battles.

   Besides, the news isn't all bad. Though variable as a series, Pirates of the Caribbean produced some enjoyable entertainment.

   Considering that Disney has few if any equals when it comes to cross-marketing, it's hardly surprising that the company has forged ahead with Jungle Cruise, casting Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt in lead roles. 

   If you've seen the movie's trailer, you might think Jungle Cruise was going to be a brash take on African Queen, the 1951 movie that paired Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn. 

    No way. The movie seems closer in lineage to Raiders of the Lost Ark -- only tapped down a few pegs on the age and inventiveness scale.

    The result is a movie full of action but lacking any real distinction.

    The story follows Lily (Blunt) on an Amazon adventure (that's the river, not the shopping site) in which a rogue skipper (Johnson) agrees to use his barely functional vessel to guide the adventurous Lily on a search for The Tree of Life.

   Rejected by London's scientific establishment, Emily persists, exploring the river with her brother (Jack Whitehall), a foppish fellow who eventually discloses the reason for his refusal to marry the eligible women who have been pushed on him.

   Director Jaume Collet-Serra sets up a mildly antagonistic relationship between Johnson's Frank and Lily -- the kind we instantly know is destined to turn verbal sparring into love.

   Feigning shock at the sight of a woman wearing slacks, Frank calls Lily “Pants.” She retaliates by creating a diminutive for the word "skipper." She calls him “Skippy.”

   But Jungle Cruise hardly qualifies as a love story; instead, it uses the fabled river as an excuse to move from one action set piece to another.

   The movie takes place in the days before World War I but seldom feels anchored in any historical period -- unless its mid-20th Century Theme Park.

    Perhaps to up the funhouse ante,  the movie introduces a ghostly crew of conquistadors led by Aguirre (Ramon Martinez), an explorer who 400 years ago was cursed by the indigenous people of the Amazon for going on a killing rampage  after he was refused access to the Tree of Life. 

   If you like your movies seasoned with bugs and snakes -- CGI, of course -- you'll find plenty of those as well as the obligatory sequence in which Emily goads Frank into navigating his ramshackle boat through treacherous rapids.

   Frank, who has a pet jaguar named Proxima, harbors his own secrets and ambitions.

   The movie works overtime in its efforts to ensure us that we needn't take it seriously. Frank specializes in corny, eye-rolling jokes and the antic action seems more inspired by Chuck Jones than Disney.

   To add variety, the screenplay introduces a German nobleman played by Jesse Plemons, who demonstrates that he might be able to find a spot in Mel Brooks' s The Producers should anyone decide to take another run at that material.

   Johnson delivers Frank’s most caustic lines without ever making him less than likable. Blunt does her best to create a real character. Whitehall, a comic by trade, adds humor -- most of it pretty obvious.

   Nobly motivated, Lily wants to help mankind conquer disease, which differentiates her from Plemons' character who's only interested in acquiring power.

    Efforts at feminist assertion and sensitivity toward indigenous culture play second fiddle to the massive labors that apparently went into creating what surely was intended as an "exciting'' spectacle.

    I wouldn't say Jungle Cruise gives fun a bad name, but the characters and story are strictly off-the-rack. Put another way: Jungle Cruise isn’t up to the best Pirates of the Caribbean standards. 

    I leave it to you to decide exactly what that says about the world in which we find ourselves.

'Hobbs & Shaw': more preposterous action

Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham star in an action spinoff that wears out its welcome.

Fast and Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw attempts to expand the reach of an amped-up series that began in 2001 with a Rob Cohen-directed movie about street racing. The original movie, modest by current standards, marked a surprising entry into that summer's big-screen sweepstakes, a refreshing blend of speed and grit.

The series, which long ago made the leap into franchise territory, now has spawned a slightly demented offspring, one that’s far enough afield from its cinematic parents that it feels obliged to proclaim its lineage. I’m cynical enough to view Hobbs & Shaw as a superfluous mutation, an attempt to squeeze more mileage out of a series that never seems to run out of road.

Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw teams Dwayne Johnson's genially muscular Hobbs with Jason Statham's sneering Shaw. The two characters have history, which is another way of saying they don't get along. Both, of course, have cropped up in previous Fast & Furious movies. This time, they’re the main event.

A largely irrelevant plot brings these bickering battlers together for a job that Hobbs immodestly refers to as "saving the world." In this case, saving the world involves preventing the spread of a bio-engineered virus that could wipe out most of humanity. The virus hardly matters because even the characters don't seem to take the plot all that seriously.

Idris Elba signs on as the movie's bad guy, which is how his character introduces himself. "I'm the bad guy," he says, cueing a laugh line by signaling the movie's wish to play a genre-mocking game -- some of the time, if it not entirely.

On the less jokey side of the ledger: An evil corporation has weaponized Elba's character, turning him into a human with robotic capabilities that approach super-heroism. He supposedly represents a new rung on the evolutionary ladder.

As it turns out, Shaw's character has a sister (Vanessa Kirby) who's also trying to save humanity, an occupation that's always in large demand in summer movies. In the movie's early scenes, Kirby's Hattie steals the virus by embedding the capsule that contains it in her palm.

The Fast and Furious franchise always has made room for bold women. Kirby's Hattie carries on the tradition; she's a genuine butt-kicker who needs little assistance from the affable Hobbs or the dyspeptic Shaw.

Remember the virus? We're told, it eventually will go ... well ... viral. The clock ticks away.

Director David Leitch and his team don't pay much attention to this or any other clock, allowing the movie to unfold over a distended two hours and 15 minutes.

Hobbs & Shaw works its way toward a finale on Samoa without making it seem as if anything vital is at stake, aside from the filmmakers' ability to engineer ridiculous chase sequences and other impossible feats. The action is outlandish but not all of it is thrilling.

If you're of a mind, you may want to view the movie's Samoan finale as a statement -- albeit one that's delivered with as much ham-fisted panache as the barbs traded by Hobbs & Shaw. Hobbs reunites with his estranged brother (Cliff Curtis). They use Samoan weapons to ward off high-tech baddies. Can simple humanity triumph?

The movie includes an appearance by Helen Mirren, as Shaw's imprisoned mother, superfluous aside from suggesting participation in future movies. There also are a couple of cameos from actors I won’t name lest I spoil the surprise.

Look, I have no need to believe anything that happens in this kind of entertainment, but I'd like, at a minimum, to feel a sense of sustained involvement. That's not easy when a movie’s action, though abundant, isn't necessarily about creating excitement but about impressing us with the filmmakers' ingenuity. A little of this sort of thing goes a long way, and Hobbs & Shaw offers more than a little -- way too much, in fact.

Wrestling for family and fame

Fighting With My Family uses a regional British accent to freshen its formula.

All sports movies -- even those that have more to do with showmanship than competition -- follow a familiar template. An underdog beats long odds to wind up exulting in a triumphant moment, usually one involving a championship. Such movies serve a dual purpose. First, they're meant to entertain and second, they provide inspirational reassurance, something along the lines of, "Hey, if I can do it (whatever 'it' happens to be), so can you." Many of these movies bolster their credibility with early-picture declarations that they are based on true stories.

Fighting With My Family, the latest such endeavor, takes place in the world of professional wrestling, where "competitors" execute choreographed moves designed to keep each other from getting killed or maimed.

All such movies struggle to find an element that adds flavor to the formula and Fighting With My Family follows suit. In this case, the movie's idiosyncracies derive from its focus on a downscale wrestling family that lives in Norwich, England. The Knight family has pinned its hopes on a dream, that at least one of them will ascend to WWE ranks.

Toward this end, Saraya (Florence Pugh) and her brother Zak (Jack Lowden) travel from Norwich to London to audition for a Florida-based program that trains wrestlers for the WWE. To move on, they must impress Hutch, a talent scout played by Vince Vaughn in a role that allows him to crack the whip, both verbally and physically.

To borrow from another hoary genre (military training movies), Hutch becomes a kind of drill sergeant; the aspiring wrestlers, his raw recruits. Vaughn's Hutch doesn't believe in letting wash-outs down easily. He tells them their dreams have reached an unceremonious conclusion. End of story.

A basic tension emerges when Saraya -- who later takes the wrestling name Paige -- makes the cut and her hard-driving brother doesn't. The fates of brother and sister are determined less by physical ability than by what Hutch deems that "special something," the capacity to win over a crowd that enjoys vocal rejection as much as enthusiastic acceptance. Put another way, wrestling fans would just as soon jeer as cheer.

Dwayne Johnson -- a.k.a. The Rock -- once staked out his turf in the world of professional wrestling. Johnson served as one of the movie's producers and makes brief appearances that may have been intended to add some mega-wattage to a lesser known cast.

While Zak broods at home, Paige becomes an outsider in a group of trainees in which the women tend to be blondes who look good in bikinis and whose looks are expected to help them.

The movie would have us believe that Paige represents the freakish outsider and the rest of the women are the wrestling equivalent of stuck-up sorority girls. To its credit, the movie later tries to humanize its trio of hotties.

Pugh approaches her work with determination as her performance follows a typical arc through aspiration, self-doubt and final ascendancy.

As Paige's parents, Nick Frost and Lena Headey register well, portraying a couple that survives by staging wrestling matches in Norwich. The movie spells out the pressures put on Paige for her the sake of her family (her triumph also will be theirs) but too easily resolves them. So it goes with a story directed by Stephen Merchant who also wrote the screenplay and makes an appearance as Zac's father-in-law.

As is the case with many formulaic sports movies, too much thought can serve as a spoiler. Why we're supposed to celebrate Paige's triumph in a sport where matches are scripted proves a bit baffling. It probably has something to do with her finally becoming self-confident enough to claim her place in the wrestling world.

Enough. Fighting With My Family earns points for trying to freshen the formula and achieves some success as a crowd-pleasures, but its truest moments arrive during the end credits when Paige and her real family make their obligatory appearance in what has been, to cite yet another sport, a mostly minor-league effort.

'Rampage' offers little that's fresh

Dwayne Johnson's charms are lost in a routine thriller based on gene-editing.

Movies long have made room for those who can establish a personality on screen, but might not be at home at The Old Vic. During his heyday, no one went to Arnold Schwarzenegger movies expecting Arnold to rival the DeNiros and Pacinos of the world. They went because Arnold was ... well ... reliably Arnold.

Same goes for Dwayne Johnson, a movie star who projects smiling affability better than he projects sneering toughness. Unfortunately, in Rampage — a movie derived from a video game dating to the 1980s — Johnson is upstaged by a trio of monsters and not especially original ones at that.

A movie that riffs on the dangers of genetic editing, Rampage suffers from its own mismatched cinematic DNA. At times, the movie plays like juvenile fare aimed at 12-year-olds. At other times, it opts for unabashed sentiment. And at still other times, it tries to cash in its monster chips by having a giant crocodile, a giant flying wolf, and a giant gorilla attempt to reduce Chicago to the kind of rubble that routinely has been strewn across the streets of countless predecessor movies.

This time out, Johnson plays Davis Okoye, a primatologist who once challenged poachers to befriend and save a rare albino gorilla he subsequently named George. Davis transported George from his African home to a San Diego wildlife facility, taught the gorilla how to communicate by signing and convinced George that he and those who cared for him were valued members of the gorilla's “troop.”

You don’t need much imagination to know that an evil corporation driven by a greedy executive (Malin Akerman) and her PR-oriented brother (Jake Lacy) are eager to use genetics to accumulate as many ill-gotten gains as possible.

After their company's deep-space genetic experiment crashes to earth during a brief prologue, George and two other creatures are exposed to canisters containing a horrible pathogen that will mix but not match their genetic makeup. The creatures become bigger and more aggressive, prompting a military response, which gives the movie a reason to drop in on a command center from time-to-time. Movies such as this need command centers, even when they're inhabited by misguided military men.

Tension presumably is meant to arise from fretting about poor George's future. Will George, a harmless prankster by nature, eventually return to his human-loving self?

Before that can happen, George must escape captivity so that he can trample his away across the country as the movie builds toward a finale in which George goes full Kong and climbs a Chicago skyscraper.

Early on, Johnson’s character acquires a sidekick (Naomi Harris), a genetic researcher who once worked for the evil corporation and holds the key to developing an antidote that will restore the creatures to their less dangerous state.

Rampage can’t totally accept its own destructive impulses. Late in the picture, Johnson is called upon to deliver a line in which Davis must proclaim to a charging crocodile that he’s had his fill of its mindless cruelty. Davis employs the “MF” word, but the final part of the expression is muffled, perhaps to keep the movie within what might be called “family-oriented bounds.”

Directed by Brad Johnson, who previously directed Johnson in San Andreas, Rampage isn't the first movie to toy with the dangers of genetic experimentation and it surely won't be the last. But Rampage is so far from qualifying as a best of its breed that a movie such as Jurassic Park looks like a doctoral dissertation by comparison. Enough said.

Few laughs wash ashore in 'Baywatch'

Dwayne Johnson and Zac Efron are lifeguards in a movie that never convinces that it has any reason to exist.

Why anyone wanted to turn a beach-boob-and-muscle TV series into a movie is beyond me. But that didn't stop director Seth Gordon (Horrible Bosses and Identity Thief) from taking on the challenge of creating a big-screen version of Baywatch.

In its new version, the always buffed Dwayne Johnson teams with an equally buffed Zac Efron to create a movie that tries to parody something that already looked like parody, a lame bit of 1990s TV that developed a following among those who liked pecs, peek-a-boo bathing suits and unblemished skin.

Mixing hard bodies with a soft-headed mystery involving drugs and real estate, Baywatch is neither funny nor tense enough to drive the movie to whatever destination it may have been trying to reach.

Despite a few attempts at self-referential hipness (cameos from David Hasselhoff and Pamela Anderson among them), the movie's humor mostly dips as low as the bikinis the Baywatch women wear.

Johnson's Mitch runs the Baywatch lifeguard squad like a military unit; he insists that the lifeguards devote themselves to protecting a stretch of Florida beach as if it were Fort Knox.

As part of a PR ploy, Mitch is forced to hire a disgraced Olympic medalist (Efron) who begins the movie as a kind of selfish outlier but (here's a surprise) eventually accepts the group ethos.

To further fulfill the demands of contemporary comedy, the movie adds the obligatory nerdy guy to its muscular mix. Jon Bass plays Ronnie, a guy who's accepted as a lifeguard trainee because he has "heart." The movie's first big joke involves Ronnie, an erection and a beach chair with slats. It's not the last penis joke, either.

Despite his bean-bag physique, Ronnie seems to catch the eye of a bombshell, run-in-slow-mo lifeguard played by Kelly Rohrbach.

Priyanka Chopra who plays Victoria, the villain of the piece, a woman with murderous plans to acquire every bit of real estate in the bay area.

A local cop (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) wonders why a group of lifeguards are getting themselves involved in crime. You may share his consternation, but then it's probably not fair to expect a Baywatch movie to make much sense.

About three-quarters of the way through, the script finds a way to sideline Johnson and allow Efron to dominate the proceedings, a major mistake.

Forget the movie's amped-up ocean rescues: Someone was needed to rescue a screenplay that should have been beached.

If you're looking for a movie that has some laughs and effectively deals with the idiocy of bygone TV shows, try Mindhorn, a British comedy available on Netflix. It actually manages to find some laughs in telling the story of a washed-up TV hero who's asked to help solve a real-life murder

Bloat hits the 'Furious' franchise

A ridiculous story, lots of action and decreasing amounts of fun.

What started in 2001 as an amped-up and gritty look at the street racing subculture has spawned a total of sevens sequels. Overall, the Fast and Furious movies have done a good job of satisfying action-hungry audiences while also taking on the job of turning an ethnically diverse cast into a popular rogue family.

That was then.

In its latest incarnation -- dubbed The Fate of the Furious -- the franchise finally falls prey to a 21st Century disease: overstated bloat. Not only that, the movie has lost much of its original flavor, resorting instead to a ludicrous story in which the Furious gang becomes a kind of Mission Impossible team that must thwart the ambitions of a super villain named Cipher (Charlize Theron). Cipher wants to go nuclear and take half the planet with her.

Vin Diesel's Dominic Toretto faces what passes in such movies as a moral crisis, and the movie drags out familiar characters Jason Statham's Deckard, Dwayne Johnson's Hobbs and Kurt Russell's Mr. Nobody. A hodgepodge of a script mixes and matches characters as the ruthless Cipher coerces Dom into working against his old team.

The movie begins with Dom and Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) honeymooning in Havana. With Latin beauties allowing their rumps to protrude from skimpy short shorts, a street race develops, really the last time the movie takes a serious bow toward its revved-up roots.

Director F. Gary Gray increasingly yields to the temptation of producing a clangorous noise-machine with lots of computer-generated effects, the most notable occurring when hundreds of cars tumble headlong out of a parking garage as the result of a major hacking that takes control of their computer systems.

By the end, the movie introduces a gargantuan submarine that threatens the car-crazed team. And, of course, many "hot" cars race by, although they all speed so quickly, it's difficult to admire them.

Some of the regulars get short shrift, particularly Tyrese Gibson and Ludacris, who banter with one another in limited but typical fashion. Nathalie Emmanuel portrays the group's tech genius.

A screenplay by Chris Morgan and Gary Scott Thompson includes the kind of macho lines that are supposed to be repeated outside of the theater but most of them prove ham-handed. At one point, Diesel's Dom says that the mad genius Cipher should be wary about taking her foot off the tiger's neck; i.e., him. I suppose that's the movie's idea of sage advice.

Of course, gunplay and explosions are followed by more gunplay and more explosions.

Best thing about the movie: Helen Mirren's cameo appearance.

Second best thing: Statham bringing a bit of winking humor to his role as an assassin.

Third best thing: There is no third best thing.

OK, I'm speaking only for myself here. It should be noted that this installment surely will rock the box office, that two more movies are slated and that, by now, audiences have learned to accept the preposterous and even to love it.

Once a bona fide movie, the real fate of the series is to have become a highly calculated mix of muscle, mayhem, faux menace and canned sentiment. For me, there's more noise than fun in this edition.

Bold 'Furious 7' races into theaters

Spectacular set pieces carry this latest installment of car chaos.

The latest installment of the Fast and Furious series turns the words "beyond belief" into feeble understatement.

Oblivious to the laws of either script logic or Newtonian physics, Furious 7 makes no bones about trying to win audience favor by packaging action set pieces that go so far over-the-top, they beg to be watched with open-mouthed wonder.

The most spectacular of these high points takes place in starkly modern Abu Dhabi. There, Vin Diesel's Dom and Paul Walker's Brian drive a sleek Lykan HyperSport -- lipstick red, of course -- through an upper-story window of the city's Etihad Towers. The car flies across a terrifying chasm and slams through the window of another tower.

Clearly, we're meant to marvel at the sheer excess and spectacular audacity of such bits. We do -- or at least I did, even when I first saw it one of the movie's trailers.

But, hey, it's not all pedal to the metal. It should be noted that Furious 7 concludes with a touching tribute to Walker, delivered in the bros-forever style that has characterized the series from the start.

If you didn't know that Walker's death in 2013 occurred during the shooting of Furious 7, you might conclude that director James Wan (The Conjuring) was downplaying Walker's contribution to add a bit of freshness. No big deal.

For the record: I've read that the filmmakers used Walkers' brothers -- Caleb and Cody -- as stand-ins to finish shooting. It's not easy to tell where one Walker left off and another began, but I couldn't help trying. Every time Brian appeared on screen, I wondered a little about how he had gotten there.

Each installment includes new characters, inserted the way car dealers try to pile on options.

Added to this year's model: Kurt Russell, no stranger to action movies having escaped from both New York and Los Angeles in John Carpenter movies, plays a character called Mr. Nobody, head of a private army.

Djimon Hounsou shows up as a scowling bad guy with terrorist inclinations.

British actor Jason Statham also joins the fray; he portrays Deckard Shaw, a man seeking vengeance for damages done to his younger brother in the previous movie. Deckard wants the Fast and Furious crew to pay dearly.

Although his facial expression never seems to vary, it's safe to assume that Deckard enjoys blowing things up. What, after all, would a movie titled Furious 7 be without a few flaming fireballs and a bit of flying debris?

Nathalie Emmanuel, familiar from HBO's Game of Thrones, signs on, as well. She plays a gifted computer hacker who knows all about a program that enables people to track and follow anyone in the world, providing he or she is carrying some sort of electronic device.

Lots of folks want to get their hands on this program, but the story -- if it can be called that -- doesn't build anything like traditional suspense: Rather, it has the feel of something written in the back seat of a speeding car on a bumpy road. It jars, bounces and sometimes even splatters.

Oh well, when things become too ragged, you can count on Diesel to deliver the kind of line that seems designed to remind the audience that mayhem isn't the only point.

"The most important thing in life will always be family," says Diesel's Dom, evoking a recurring theme.

The regular crew members return, and -- in varying degrees -- receive their moment in the spotlight.

Of these regulars, I'd rank Ludacris's Tej as my favorite. Playing smart in a series such as this is no small achievement. Way to go Ludacris.

You probably should also know that the amnesia-afflicted Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) gets into a knock-down, drag-out battle with a character played by Ronda Rousey, a champion ultimate fighter in her non-movie life.

Oh, I almost forgot. Dwayne Johnson appears again, although we don't see much of FBI agent Hobbs until he rises from a hospital bed at the end of the movie so that he can tote a major weapon into the streets of LA and spray bullets at a menacing aircraft.

I don't want to sound like a spoilsport, but frenetic editing sometimes gives the action a near-haphazard feeling, so much so that during the movie's prolonged finale, it's not always possible to tell who's fighting whom.

Still, it's difficult to watch a movie such as Furious 7 and not be amazed by the heights (sometimes literally) to which the car chaos has been taken, and there's enough globe hopping -- from the United Arab Emirates to Azerbaijan -- to create yet another level of diversion.

We all know the drill. A Fast and Furious movie exists to deliver out-sized action, cool cars and an occasional display of female body parts, curvy as a polished fender. One imagines that there are at least three general kinds of scene headings in the script for Furious 7: interiors, exteriors and posteriors.

And don't think that just because Walker's gone, the series is done. Trying to stop one of these franchises is like trying to halt a speeding semi-truck. Either get out of the way or go along for the ride. Resistance, I'm afraid, is pointless.

Furious? Maybe. Faster? Definitely.

Another blur of a movie from the Fast & Furious gang
Here's the thing about the apparently endless string of Fast & Furious movies. As number six gets ready to roar into theaters, I find myself only dimly in touch with the first five. They've all blended into a blur of flexed muscles, macho posturing, revving engines and nitrous-fueled blasts of energy.

I agree with those who've credited director Jason Lin -- at the helm for the last four movies and now bowing out of the series -- with giving the Fast & Furious audience precisely what it wants. (See list above and add a bit of female flesh for spunk and pulchritude for good measure.)

I don't mean to sound totally cynical about any of this. It can't be easy to orchestrate the stunt and special effects work that sells tickets to a franchise that began way back in the Pleistocene days of 2001 with director Rob Cohen at the helm.

Should each sequel fail to escalate the level of excitement, fans easily could revolt. And, yes, some of the action is so impossibly silly that you can't help but smile as you watch. Let the actors pretend that the plot actually matters. There's no compelling reason for us to follow suit.

Adding Dwayne Johnson to the Fast & Furious mix and bringing back Michelle Rodriguez (whose character was supposed to have died) hasn't hurt anything in the sixth edition.

Through all of its chaos, the series has tried (not as successfully this time) to remain true to the street-racing ethos that gave the first movie trace elements of authenticity, but -- for me -- even well-staged action can seem a little routine at this point, and I can't say that either Paul Walker (as one of the leads) and Vin Diesel (as another) are among the actors whose work I deeply admire.

I suppose the filmmakers have come up with a serviceable enough plot. A terrorist (Luke Evans) wants to build some sort of nuclear device. Aiming to stop him, Johnson's character, a cop of some sort, travels to the Canary Islands to recruit Walker and Diesel, outlaws who claim to have abandoned the wild life.

They haven't, of course, and the movie quickly kicks into globe-hopping mode. The explanation for what brings Rodriguez's character back to life is far-fetched, but then again, so is just about everything in a Fast & Furious movie.

The rest of cast (Tyrese Gibson, Sung Kan and Chris "Ludacris" Bridges adds seasoning, and some attempt has been made to show that time has passed.

Walker's Brian and Jordana Brewster's Mia now have a baby, which suggests that the Fast & Furious mantle will be passed on forever, eventually rivaling the age of giant Redwoods.

Oh well, it's better to please the movie's core audience than to rile it. Fast and Furious 6 may not make dramatic history, but it should keep the gear-heads, wannabes and fanboys and girls happy, even as the rest of us wonder if it's not time to slow down.

A transformed Michael Bay? Hmm...

Violence sometimes trumps comedy in Pain & Gain.
As it happens, I'm writing this review in Krakow, while working on a film project. Poland, a land rich in both painful history and cultural gain, seems an odd place to be reviewing Michael Bay's dramatically hyperventilated Pain & Gain, but that's the situation in which I find myself.

I suppose it's not entirely inappropriate. If you follow a diagonal line from the National Museum in Krakow to an opposing street corner, you'll run smack into a colossus of a billboard advertising Tom Cruise's Oblivion. That billboard, I suppose, underscores the oft-made but still unsettling point: American movie culture is ubiquitous.

So, Pain & Gain ...

Basing his movie on an improbable but true story, Bay detours from the crash & smash style he brought to movies such as Transformers, forsaking massive explosions for a hyped-up look at low-level Florida thugs who cook up a kidnapping scheme.

In many ways, Pain & Gain is an odd, even bizarre hybrid -- part comedy, part display of shocking violence and part satire about the distorting powers of the American dream.

Despite its multiple ambitions, the movie works best as a comedy about dopey, violent hoodlums who are too dumb to achieve their felonious ambitions. Bay tries to give the violence as much twisted humor as possible, serving up jolts that cause us to wince even as we chuckle.

There's a fine line here, of course, and Bay sometimes crosses it. Too much vividly displayed violence can (and sometimes does) steamroll the movie's comic elements.

Muscularity, of course, is what Bay's after with this story about body builders gone terribly wrong. Mark Wahlberg plays Daniel Lugo, a weight lifter who works as a trainer at Miami's Sun Gym. The time: the 1990s.

Fearing that he's stuck in a dead-end life, Lugo attends a self-help seminar. He decides that he should be a doer. For Lugo, this means hatching a scheme to kidnap a successful businessman (Tony Shalhoub).

Lugo recruits two cohorts (Anthony Mackie and Dwayne Johnson) to carry out his ill-conceived criminal plans. He decides to hold Shalhoub's Victor Kershaw as a prisoner, until Kershaw signs over all his property and wealth to Lugo.

This trio of IQ-deprived felons doesn't count on Kershaw's powers of resistance. The victim refuses to acquiesce. Lugo & company then proceed with a variety of crudely conceived tortures.

To say that these guys are ham-handed gives them more credit than they deserve. They're precisely the kind of bungling fools one used to find in old Ealing Studio comedies -- with one exception: They're in a Michael Bay movie that seems intent on channeling some of Quentin Tarantino's taste for irony-laced violence.

Each of the thugs represents a different brand of self-deception. Lugo comes off a flexed muscle of a man whose brawn and ambition exceed his brain power and skill. Since his release from prison, Johnson's Paul Doyle has been struggling to give up a life of sex, drugs and crime. Despite a new-found love for Jesus, Paul has trouble staying a straight and narrow course. Mackie portrays Adrian Doorbal, a young man whose steroid abuse has left him buffed but impotent.

The supporting cast adds additional noir flavor. Rebel Wilson, who scored big time as Fat Amy in Pitch Perfect, plays the woman who falls for Mackie's Adrian. Michael Rispoli has a nice turn as a porn king who's as sleazy as our trio of heroes, but smarter, and Ken Jeong makes a credible motivational guru, the man whose pseudo-philosophy encourages Wahlberg's Lugo to aspire to a future that doesn't involve wearing sweat pants.

Also look for Ed Harris, as a retired Miami detective who decides to help recover Shaloub's character's wealth.

You should take the movie's "R" rating seriously, but it's not always is easy to take the same attitude toward the rest of Pain & Gain, which can feel like drama gone berserk.

Look, Pain & Gain represents Bay's most interesting work in some time, even though its stylized agitation and dim-witted characters can feel increasingly mismatched.

And then there's this: Pain & Gain has some enjoyable kick, but to paraphrase a line from the late Pauline Kael, the movie may make you wonder why you're spending valuable time watching dumb people do a lot of dumb things.

'Fast Five's' best when it speeds and bleeds

Fast Five' doesn't make much sense, but its action works and it also reminds us that Hollywood's summer thrill ride is fast approaching.

Fast Five makes no real sense, features some of the year's least interesting acting and revolves around a disappointingly generic heist plot: Regulars from the "Fast and Furious" series angle to steal $100 million from a Brazilian drug lord.

Does any of that matter? Not really. If you're a fan of fast-paced, improbable action, Fast Five delivers the frenzied goods, although you may find yourself twiddling your thumbs between action set pieces.

Thankfully, director Justin Lin stages the action on a grand, pulse-pounding scale, affording us the opportunity to watch a bus do aerial flips, to see high-priced cars being hijacked from a speeding train, and to witness a climactic chase sequence that threatens to destroy half of Rio de Janeiro while maiming nearly every member of the city's police force.
In case you're wondering, all that belongs on the plus side of the movie's ledger.

The series' two franchise players are back: Vin Diesel, who looks like a man constructed entirely from biceps, returns along with Paul Walker, whose all-American looks are marred only by some obligatory stubble. Diesel and Walker play Dominic Toretto and Brian O'Conner, a champion street racer and a former cop who wind up in Brazil after Brian helps spring Dominic from jail.

Jordana Brewster returns as Mia, Dominic's sister and Brian's main squeeze. Brian and Mia don't have much time for squeezing, though. Like everyone else in the movie, they're too busy showing off their muscles, sweating profusely or planning a totally preposterous robbery.

Dwayne Johnson, formerly known as The Rock, constitutes the biggest (as well as bulkiest) addition. Johnson portrays Hobbs, a supercop who's pursuing our heroes. Sporting a goatee, bulging veins and a determined expression, Johnson joins the kick-ass festivities with as much gusto as he can muster.

In typical B-movie fashion, Brian and Dominic assemble a gang to pull off the job, a task that provides the movie with a reason to add a large supporting cast. Chris "Ludacris" Bridges, Tyrese Gibson, Sung Kang, Gal Gadot and Tego Calderon add humor, some of it by way of comic action, notably a bit in which the toilets in a men's room are blown up. Very messy.

If you see the Fast and Furious movies because you love street racing, you may feel short-changed. At one point, Dominic and Paul seek out Rio's street-racing scene, but Lin ignores the race in which they compete.

I won't describe any more of the action because most of the fun involves the surprisingly ingenious ways in which Lin, working from a script by Chris Morgan, piles on the carnage as the movie races through Rio's impoverished favelas and across its sleek downtown.

The roar of the action and the crackle of gunfire tend to drown out the small voice in us that wonders what happened to logic. Oh well, with a movie such as Fast Five, credibility takes a back seat to stunts, grunts, artfully designed mayhem and fake grit.

Fans will want to stay through the end credits for a postscript that Lin has added. The rest of the world should know what it probably already suspects: Fast Five is more product than movie, a pre-summer money machine that probably will rev up the box office before the bigger boys arrive. Think of it as Hollywood stripping down to its T-shirt as it starts to flex its thrill-ride muscles.

A 'Rock' by any other name ...

He's out for blood and nothing will stop him. Faster is full of nasty, B-movie violence, but Dwayne Johnson may not be the right man for the job.

I was going to skip Faster, the new thriller starring Dwayne Johnson, the actor formerly known as The Rock. But when I saw that George Tillman, Jr had directed the movie, I changed my mind. Tillman, I remembered, had directed Notorious (2009), one of the better movies about a rapper's life. I figured Tillman could handle the down-and-dirty action that would be required if Faster were going to get its engine cranking. * A little better than you might expect (providing you have a taste for this sort of thing) and not as good as you might hope: That's the verdict on Faster, which minimizes Johnson's dialogue and pours on the hard-boiled, B-movie violence. * Watching Johnson in this kind of role makes you realize his limitations. It also encourages appreciation for what guys like Charles Bronson and Clint Eastwood were able to accomplish with revenge sagas. Those guys could look at you in ways that would cut you to pieces. * Johnson does the best he can as Driver, a newly released convict who's seeking revenge on the guys who killed his brother. Physically imposing as he is, Johnson seems to be stuck with a nice guy's face. * Billy Bob Thornton slips into fully ruined mode to play a heroin-addicted cop who tries to stop Johnson's character in mid-rampage. * Oliver Jackson-Cohen portrays a pretty boy British hit man who's been hired to take out the Driver. * If you're looking for point-blank violence, you won't have to wait long, but the movie tries to take the sting off its more exploitative aspects by adding a religious gloss, a mini-semon on forgiveness. * Enough. If you're looking for nasty B-movie thrills, Faster has some, although it also can test your patience for cliche and bad writing. * One more thing: If you can't see the final twist coming, you may want to have your movie vision checked.