So this is the point in the franchise where they quit even pretending to take things seriously. If the fifth one was really a heist movie, and the sixth one was a more conventional action movie, this one is essentially a videogame in movie form.

Like, there are three big action setpieces. They’re all of them absurd, with no concessions to logic at all ever, with every single decision being made for maximum visual and adrenaline impact. In the first one, the gang needs to ambush a convoy on the road, and they pick their ambush point as this inaccessible portion of a mountain road.

So, how do they get there? Do they drive up the road ahead of time and set a position? Do they follow the road from the opposite way of the convoy they’re ambushing? No and no. They parachute their cars in, landing them on the road in tight formation in a way that would be completely impossible, and which would probably destroy the cars (one of them is a WRX!) if it were possible.

But, the director and screenwriter correctly figure, who gives a shit? If you’re watching this movie, you’ve made an implicit contract not to sit here and pick holes in their logic, and to lean into the bombastic action. If you keep up your end of the bargain, they certainly keep up theirs by delivering all the over-the-top action sequences you can handle. (In that mountaintop race-and-battle, for instance, multiple cars fly off of cliffs, to outcomes variously lethally destructive and totally shrugworthy, based solely on whatever would be coolest at that point.)

If the action sequences are like watching a QTE-heavy videogame, the plot and character bits are like watching cutscenes in that videogame. There are multiple international super-spy agencies operating here, with access to science-fictional military gear and technology. Like the action scenes, none of it makes any sense if you think about it, but is totally coherent and sensible as long as you never make the mistake of doing that.

So it’s lots of fun, is what I’m saying. But now I want to talk about the ending a bit, and I guess a spoiler cut is appropriate here, even though I know virtually nobody cares.

Spoilers

So at a certain point near the end, the movie started feeling really elegiac about Paul Walker’s character. And like, I know he died in real life, but I didn’t really know when. The movie felt complete and not like they were editing around anything, so I assumed it was some time after this movie was made.

But: no. He died in the middle of it, and they took a big break from filming to do rewrites and reshoots (I guess his brothers were stand-ins for him in some scenes?), and so the ending both explains his absence from future iterations of the franchise and is also a tribute to him; it’s like a series of emotional goodbyes and then he literally rides off into the sunset, and man, it should not have affected me that much. I mean, I knew the guy was dead already, but I guess I never actually cared before; and now after seeing these movies, it felt like a real loss that kinda snuck up on me, so yeah, real tearjerker of an ending that still manages to be tonally appropriate for this totally over-the-top fun installment somehow.

All in all, I think Five is probably still the best movie of the lot so far, but it’s possible this one is the most enjoyable if you leave conventional measures of quality to the side. Like GvK, you can’t watch these later movies without having seen the whole uneven franchise, and I can’t exactly recommend the whole series on the basis of these few high notes; but… I don’t disrecommend it, for sure.

Two random side notes:

  1. The Corona (beer, not virus) product placement was amazing. Like, it’s the kind of moment that could appear in a parody skit on SNL, but they played it straight.

  2. It’s really remarkable how the tangled chronology of Tokyo Drift has been woven through this series. Like, it’s an essentially standalone movie, but then at the very end of Tokyo Drift, they tie in Vin Diesel, with no real idea of how they’re going to use that; then in 4 and 5, they have a character from the movie appearing effectively as prequels to Tokyo Drift; then 6 reprises a moment from the end of Tokyo Drift, except recharacterizing it into something larger and more meaningful; and it’s only in this movie that we finally get beyond the ending shot Vin Diesel appearance of Tokyo Drift. It’s like this continuity serpent just woven through four movies that it was never even intended to be related to. Totally wild.