Men in cars blowing things up

 

    First off, Roman Numeral fans: It's Fast Ten, not Fast "X," which sounds like the name of a quick-acting laxative. 

    Fast X, the latest in the Fast & Furious series, goes all in on preposterous over-stated action while acknowledging a trio of virtues: family, honor and faith.

    These virtues, and just about everything else, play second fiddle to blasts of fiery action. Let's be real, though. When a round, Volkswagen-sized bomb rolls through the streets of Rome, it's unlikely anyone will be pondering the qualities that define moral excellence.

   Fast X, by the way, is the first of two movies. It's no spoiler to report that director Louis Leterrier (The Incredible Hulk) concludes his two-hour and 21-minute collection of explosions, gunfire, and insanely reckless driving with a cliffhanger. 

   Less fun than the best efforts of the franchise (take your pick), Fast X includes familiar characters, pays homage to past favorites (even offering a glimpse of Paul Walker) and drops cameos like breadcrumbs along its destructive path.

   Early on, Dom and Letty (Vin Diesel and Michelle Rodriguez) are happily raising their son Little Brian (Leo Abelo Perry) in Los Angeles. Grandma Toretto (Rita Moreno) presides while the Fast family (Tyrese Gibson, Ludacris, Sung Kang, and Nathalie Emmanuel) gather to hoist a few brews.

    It doesn't take long for the team to encounter this edition's villain. Dante (Jason Momoa), a Brazilian maniac, wants to avenge his father's death at the hands of the Fast team more than a decade ago.

    Credit Momoa with upping the movie's silliness quotient. Dante displays a mincing quality when it suits him. The most eye-catching scene occurs when Dante, his hair tied in schoolgirlish top knots, paints the toes of a corpse. 

    Other characters elbow their way into a fragmented plot, some with larger roles than others. Charlize Theron gets significant screen time as Cipher, a brilliant hacker and martial arts maven of variable loyalties.

    Michael Cena reprises his role as Jakob Toretto. In this outing, Jakob tales flight with Little Brian, who becomes a prime target in Dante's revenge plot.

    Blink and you'll miss Helen Mirren, who shows up as Queenie Shaw. Her son Deckard (Jason Staham) has a bigger presence in the movie, which adds Brie Larson as Tess, a rogue agent who works with Dom against the Agency's chief (Alan Ritchson).

    Ah yes, The Agency. Having once enlisted the Fast team's help, The Agency wants to corral Dom and his cohorts, giving them double trouble. Both Dante and the Agency are out for blood.

     Leterrier takes the action global, offering set pieces in Rome, Turin, London, Brazil, and at Hoover Dam. Cars drop from planes, fly off cliffs, and rumble up stairways. Downshifting earns a supporting role.

       Is any of this believable? Of course not. 

       But we've stopped expecting credibility from a franchise that has grown increasingly massive, including more paraphernalia, and turning itself into a mixture of demolition derby and Mission Impossible.

       Your job, should you choose to accept it. Sit through a movie that batters as much as at buoys and which has gotten so stuffed, it barely has room to accommodate the characters that once gave it a bit of humanity.

        

    

Guarding the Galaxy one more time

 

 Watching Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, I slouched in my seat, looking upward at the screen, wondering whether reality hadn’t played a trick on me. Had I regressed into an alternate reality that resembled a slightly demented version of Saturday morning TV?   

   As the characters in Vol. 3 appeared, I felt as if I were being reintroduced to a tired crew that needed a plot — or something resembling a plot — to jolt it back to life.

    Director James Gunn finds one — or more accurately several. 

     Gunn stitches a movie together from a variety of story threads, a principal one revolving around the need to battle a fiendish villain called The High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji). 

   An intergalactic criminal, The High Evolutionary wants to give the various creatures he cruelly imprisons genetic upgrades. He tries to create an environment in which perfect beings can live perfectly. 

  Of course, he’s the one who gets to define perfection, a power that turns him into a genocidal maniac. He tends to wipe out populations he regards as "mistakes."

  The screenplay, also by Gunn, ties the main battle into an origins story for Rocket (Bradley Cooper), the wise-cracking badger who keeps reminding everyone that he's not a raccoon. 

  Gravely wounded in an early-picture raid on Knowhere, the sadly depleted Guardian headquarters, Rocket spends most of the movie in a coma while Pratt’s Peter Quill races through episodes built around the search for a device that can save his friend.

  Time to wave a Guardians thematic flag: The Guardians may be disorganized and even dissolute but friendship still means something.

   Quill also pines for his girlfriend, Zoe Saldana's Gamora, who reappears but not as the green-skinned beauty of Quill's memory. She looks the same but her personality has been altered. I leave it to series aficionados to explain how this happened.*

   Despite his leadership role, Quinn doesn’t dominate the movie; he’s one more cog in the many-spoked Guardian wheel.

    Other familiar characters turn up, notably Vin Diesel's Groot, who wears out a joke in which he repeatedly announces, "I am Groot." Pom Klementieff reprises her role as Mantis, the sweet Guardian with antennae springing from her forehead.

     New characters include Adam Warlock (Will Poulter), a warrior who flies through action sequences like a guided missile.

      A surfeit of characters fosters confusion, but, hey, simplicity never has been a Marvel virtue.

     At times, Guardians functions as a parade of creatures -- Cosmo, the Talking Dog included -- that are spun from the narrative, sort of in the way Marvel spawns movie after movie from its own DNA. 

   Watch for bulbous creatures with teeth who, at one point, reconsider their destructive nature. 

    Gunn summons the movie’s better angels whenever he can. One such moment finds expression in a conflict between lovable strong man Drax (Dave Bautista) and Nebula (Karen Gillan).

   Does Drax's capacity for empathy outrank Nebula's warrior intelligence? Take a guess.

   Despite splashes of profanity, a PG-13 rating, and a fair measure of destruction, Vol. 3 seems intent on taking a sentimental journey that synchs with the idea that some of these characters are taking their leave. 

   At two hours and 29 minutes,  Guardians can be accused of bloat. But Rocket’s origin story settles the movie down, building toward what many will regard as an emotionally satisfying conclusion.

   So to get back to the Saturday morning TV experience of it all; I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you that I wasn't sometimes tempted to change the channel, but I felt a jolt of mood improvement as the movie worked its way toward a feel-good finale that helps conquer resistance.

     I guess this could be described as the third-act redemption that makes Guardians 3 tolerable. 

*Sure enough, one such aficionado provided an explanation:

"Gamora was killed by Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War and brought back to life in Avengers: Endgame in the form of an alternate universe version of herself who has no memory of their relationship."

As for me, I've always found it a bit of a burden to try to keep track of all the connections among characters in the MCU movies. 

'F9': A few new wrinkles, many explosions

     It's been a long time since anyone cared whether a Fast and Furious movie made sense.

     Good thing, too, because F9: The Fast Saga -- the latest in the series -- is so unashamedly preposterous that it hardly matters whether the glue holding various segments together has any sticking power.

    Director Justin Lin, a veteran of previous editions, has no compunction about bringing back characters thought dead or trying for an ending of gargantuan silliness. 

     There's so much action and different story lines that even the heavily muscled Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) feels like an afterthought.

     About that finale. It involves a rocket-launched Pontiac Fiero and makes good use of Tyrese Gibson and Ludacris, a duo that by this time deserves its own spinoff.

    They're the most enjoyable thing about F9 which makes room for Gibson's Roman to offer a bit of self-conscious but pointed humor. How exactly has the Fast and Furious crew emerged from so much violence with nary a scratch?

    We must not be normal, Roman opines. He's right. The crew -- the one that began in a small movie about street racing -- practically has ascended into superhero heaven. 

    Devotees probably won't mind. No one else need bother because only those who've been caught the Fast and Furious fever  have reason to add to what promises to be a large box-office haul.

   Summarizing the plot is useless. It has something to do with an evil cabal that wants to control the world's weaponry and requires Charlize Theron to return as Cipher. She spends most of the movie in glass enclosure.

    To get this part of the story rolling, F9 introduces Dom's  brother Jakob (John Cena). What? You didn't know Dom had a brother? 

   No matter. The film casts Jakob as the evil sibling. As kids, Dom and Jakob parted ways after their father died in a race-track crash in 1989. As an adult, Jakob has dedicated his life to emerging from Dom's shadow, motivation that seems entirely derived from Dom's exploits in the previous movies.

    F9 adopts a near-Bondian approach to globe hopping, turning up in London, Edinburgh, Tokyo, and a variety of other locations, thereby satisfying the growing global need for car crashes and wanton collateral damage. The car carnage relies on magnets that somehow ... er ... well ... who really cares?

   The movie's formula remains simple: Action set pieces are followed by exposition. If you sometimes feel lost, it hardly matters because, near as I could tell, the quieter scenes do little other than mark time until the next flurry of chases and explosions.

    Did I mention that Dom has a near-death experience after plunging into some deep water? That's the only thing that seems near death in this apparently endless series.

    If you like your explosions served with a side order of coherence, you may want to occupy yourself elsewhere. You also better have a high tolerance for ridiculousness that sometimes seems more nonsensical than amusing.

   Sure, some of the movie clicks, presuming you enjoy action that's more audacious than thrilling. And some will feel affection for the  mainstay characters, many of whom reunite as the story unfolds. 

    Me? I thought the movie's characters generally seemed happier to see one another than I was to see them. 

   

Those guardians of the galaxy return

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 boasts both lulls and amusements, but does nothing to tarnish the franchise.

The original Guardians of the Galaxy took the market by storm in 2014, providing a refreshing antidote to the self-seriousness that infiltrates many parts of Marvel's vast comic-book repertoire. Unexpected and slightly bizarre, the movie featured Rocket Raccoon (voice by Bradley Cooper), a snarky animal who delivered the movie's best wisecracks, and a diminutive creature named Groot (voice by Vin Diesel), a mini-tree of an alien who added an element of off-kilter cuteness.

Now comes Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 sporting a name that makes the movie sound as if it aspires to find a home in The Library of Congress catalog. Not Guardians 2 or even Part II, but "Volume 2."

This is not to say that the movie, written and directed by a returning James Gunn, mires itself in big themes. Gunn tries to replicate the self-aware attitude of the first installment, something along the lines of recognition that joyfully teeters on the rim of the pop-cultural toilet without falling in.

If that's too abstract for you, let me put it another way: The first movie was fun. The second movie? Sometimes it's fun.

A creative application of special effects and CGI help keep Vol. 2 from tarnishing the franchise, even as it falls prey to a typical second-helping problem, overcrowding in just about every department.

Vol. 2 plunges viewers into a self-referential universe that makes room for musical and TV nostalgia from the 1980s, one of the fascinations of a Guardian played by Chris Pratt; i.e., Quill. The movie's 1980s nostalgia trip also includes a recurring reference to David Hasselhoff of TV's Knight Rider and Baywatch fame.

I'm always amazed at the pop-cultural knowledge that aficionados bring to these movies. Without prompting, they can tell you all about Drax (Dave Bautista), the muscular man with the hearty laugh that always sounds forced to me, like he has to think about it before letting loose with a guffaw.

During this episode, Quill meets a character who claims to be his father. He's Ego, played by Kurt Russell. If you had any doubts, Ego's name serves as a clue about the character's intentions. Ego wants to enlist Quill's help in fulfilling a long-standing ambition. Trouble, of course, looms.

In what amounts to a glut of characters, Michael Rooker stands out as Yondo, the alien who raised Quill.

You'll also find a cameo appearance by Sylvester Stallone, and we meet Mantis (Pom Klementieff), a creature with an antenna that enables her to function as an empath. Mantis touches people and instantly knows what they're feeling.

Zoe Saldana returns as Gamora, who this time faces off against Nebula (Karen Gillan), a cyborg with blue skin who began her life as Gamora's sister. Hey, a little sibling rivalry never hurts.

Additional female power emanates for Ayesha, a golden-skinned character played by Elizabeth Debicki.

One of the movie's better bits involves a character named Taserface (Chris Sullivan), a brutish fellow whose descriptive but preposterous name prevents his victims from taking him seriously. If you're keeping score, Taserface belongs to a group called the Ravagers.

Gunn provides enough explosions to satisfy action-hungry audiences, and after a third-act dip, the movie picks up for an ending that tempers the obligatory mayhem with a bit of emotion that stems from the self-sacrificing act of one of the movie's characters.

You may be getting the impression that the movie virtually bursts with characters, effects, action and amusements. Some hit; some don't. But Vol. 2's mixed bag won't keep it from reaping a box-office bonanza. I can't say that Vol. 2 matches the enjoyment of the first movie, but, boy, can you see it trying.

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.

'Guardians:' Junk and proud of it

Another comic book of a movie from Marvel Studios

Guardians of the Galaxy, another Marvel Studios space adventure, seems to have been cobbled together from diverse genre elements in an effort to achieve a supreme level of silliness -- and that's one of its good points.

You have to give some kind of credit to a movie that asks us to develop affection for a talking tree that does little more than repeat its name: "I am Groot." Voice courtesy of Vin Diesel, who -- as it turns out -- may be better heard than seen.

Then there's Rocket, a talking raccoon (voice by Bradley Cooper) who fills the obligatory wise-ass niche.

2001, this ain't, but Guardians inoculates itself against serious criticism by adopting an ethos that goes something like this: Hey, we know this is crap, but we've gone through a lot of trouble to make the best crap possible.

If that's too pejorative, substitute the word "junk" and you're on your way.

To take the most generous view, it's fair to call Guardians a celebration of genre junk: The movie's director -- James Gunn -- also directed Slither, an unashamed and reasonably well-received B-movie from 2006. Guardians qualifies as a more expensive, but still unashamed leap into B-movie tropes.

Chris Pratt plays Peter Quill -- a.k.a. Star Lord -- a galactic scavenger who steals and re-sells his plunder.

The movie begins with a prologue explaining that Quill was born on Earth during the 1980s, but was abducted by aliens shortly after the death of his mother. The story then leaps ahead 26 years, locating itself in a mixed-species galaxy.

Familiar from TV's Parks and Recreation and from small roles in Moneyball and Zero Dark Thirty, Pratt relaxes into a big screen lead as the mildly cynical hero who, in the end, takes his galactic responsibilities seriously and who clearly evokes memories of Star Wars' Han Solo.

The drama revolves around a stolen object called The Orb, a soft-ball sized gizmo with major destructive powers. Lots of folks want to get their hands on The Orb, including Ronan the Accuser (Lee Pace).

Ronan yearns to destroy the planet Xander, which is led by Nova Prime, Glenn Close with a platinum blonde hairdo that curlicues upward like something that plopped out of a Dairy Queen spigot.

Is it possible to care whether Ronan succeeds? Not really: The movie's fight against evil couldn't be more generic: The intention, one presumes, is to keep the characters engaging enough to sustain involvement.

Sometimes it works.

Zoe Saldana plays Gamora, a green-skinned alien who's also trying to take possession of The Orb, but who ultimately joins forces with Quill.

The other fledgling Guardians -- aside from Rocket and Groot -- include Drax (Dave Bautista), a heavily muscled hulk who comes from an alien race that has yet to master the concept of metaphors. No, really.

Then there's Yondu (Michael Rooker), the space pirate who abducted Quill and who since has become his ostensible boss.

Gunn manages a couple of tender moments between Quill and Gamora, but they amount to little more than flirtations. The movie's PG-13 rating derives from violence and language.

Guardians is one of those movies that blurs the line between violence and action. There's plenty of it, although none of it struck me as particularly exciting absent anything more than the most perfunctory of rooting interests.

Gunn has given the movie the kind of borderlne cheesy look that requires lots of effort: Like Star Wars, Guardians tries to capture some of the cheap-looking innocence of a bygone days -- albeit in hipper fashion.

Not your average comic book hero, Quill has a fondness for a mix tape that was given to him by his mother. Gunn uses '70s music from this tape throughout, adding an element that may be foreign to younger audiences who know as much about Walkmans as they do about typewriters.

Will there be another Guardians movie?

Is The Orb round? Is Gamora green? Is Marvel an apparently bottomless well of comic-book characters?

I think you know the answer.

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.