Once more around the block

The late, great Alexander Walker believed that as a critic it was his job to entertain as well as inform and he approached his critiques academically, almost stripping every film of surprise.  As I do this to primarily remind myself of the experience, the same will apply.

While people may turn up their noses at The Fast and the Furious 6, it was everything Die Hard 5 should have been.  There are snappy lines, genuinely surprising plot twists and ambitious action.  The former even entertains intercontinental carnage the way A Good Day to Die Hard should have done, given the progressively wider spaces of the Bruce Willis vehicle (upper floors of a skyscraper, an airport, New York City and state, the entire Eastern Seaboard), rather than swapping one trancontinentalism for another.

The baddies this time are English, which I suppose was an inevitable turn for such a long-running franchise (a trend seemingly set to continue with no.7, as testified by Jason Statham’s uncredited role).  With the rest of the population characterised by pettifogging auctioneers and bureaucrats, there is a dearth of counter-balancing English heroes, apart from three transport policemen who have their arses handed to them by the chief villain at Waterloo Underground (presumably filmed at around 2-3am when the station would be closed), serving as a warm-up before he does the same to two of the crew.

Of course, the London scenes are unrealistic as much as I imagine the Rio ones were in The Fast and the Furious 5.  Oxford Circus is only this quiet, even at night, when there is heavy snow (as I have witnessed).  A meeting for an illegal street race would not take place in the august surrounds of what looks suspiciously like Admiralty Arch (off Trafalgar Square), especially as one line of dialogue has it that London is the worst city in the world in which to commit a crime because of a camera on every corner.  It does skewer the widely held idea that English girls are unattractive, even if the meet comes across as a particularly sluttish episode of Made in Chelsea.

It is interesting that Battersea Power Station still has the international cachet to be all but name-checked, though it is also useful to film crews as a prime piece of central London real estate that is empty along with the grounds within which it sits (I remember The Tomorrow People used it and the interior served as a backdrop to war-torn Eastern Europe in MacGyver: Lost Treasure of Atlantis).  The action transfers to Spain towards the end, with attempts to stop a seventy-ton tank (‘We’re not going to need a Plan B, we going need a Plan C, D, E and the whole alphabet!”).  The final ‘proper’ action sequence concludes on a military airbase, though even given such an environment, the runway seems unfeasibly long.

Though the group gain pardons and get to live back in Los Angeles, they ultimately finish at a disadvantage, reacquiring one member previously thought dead but – apparently – losing two (conveniently a self-contained couple within the team).  Once love between the two was mentioned, I waited for the inevitable tragedy.  To avoid slipping into predictability, the characters have to be ‘touchable’. Scrapes and bruises and bullet wounds can be easily erased but mortality is another matter.  If they were always invincible, the danger of tedium would be ever-present – it is why most of Sean Connery Bonds toyed with the character’s death (From Russia With Love, Thunderball, You Only Live Twice in the opening credits, Diamonds Are Forever in both Amsterdam and the Las Vegas Crematorium), while Roger Moore lapsed into self-parody, though there was almost always the righteous vengeance to be exacted in payment for the death of an ally.

I digress.  That one of the core looks to have been murdered in the final reel (a tradition to have a last twist after some credits have rolled that I was apprised of by a few in-the-know audience members for The Fast and the Furious 5) cannot be left unanswered – there will be a further instalment.  I say, bring it on.  There’s a lot of juice left in the tank.