Precap: Fast And The Furious 6

The latest instalment in the action-pumping, pants-at-the-seat-of-your-chair franchise, Fast and the Furious, is coming to cinemas in June 2013. Following from the ‘events’ in Fast and the Furious Five — or ‘Fast Five’ as it was marketed in a canny attempt to appeal to people too busy to say more than three words at any one time — Fast and the Furious 6 picks up where the action left off and then adds some more action.

Johnny Driver (Vince Colosimo) is back, enjoying the spoils of his high-speed driving races in a large mansion, probably in Peru. He is not paying any taxes, and all the women grinding on his pool/ dance floor are having hedonistic fun. But what could be making his trademarked face grimace in something approximate to a brood?

His life seems perfect – cocaine, ladies to snort the cocaine off, free-flowing slacks to wander around in – not to mention the ladies, am I right high-five? But perhaps someone as addicted to high-speed racing car races like Johnny Driver can never be happy with the sedate life of a billionaire pervert. Perhaps he must always be both fast and furious, like a jet-bull?

So when Nick Fury (Ulysses E. Grant) helicopters in to ask for Johnny Driver’s help in tracking down a team of motor-criminals, it’s time to take this old warhorse out of the pasture and back into the driving seat. But this is not your average urban motor-criminal gang: it’s run by the sexy and evil Lesley la Dominiqua (The Biggest Loser’s Michelle Bridges), who used to be Driver’s main squeeze.

If you’d asked me seven years ago whether anything could top Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, I would have laughed hysterically in your face. But Fat-F 6 firmly keeps the bar at exactly the same level. This movie has got everything: high speed car races, gun battles and gun battles during high speed car races.

I think the core of why these movies are so successful is the fact that they are an excellent vehicle for the highly talented Vince Colosimo. Colosimo’s Johnny Driver is just such a believable character – you honestly believe that this man is both able and likely to drive in a reckless fashion. Yet somehow he is still an everyman. Sometime in between driving a Porsche entirely through a plane like a small, fast dick pushing through an enormous, mammoth dick, he can have quiet moments of humbleness and even a kind of goofy humour.  Perhaps in a sense he embodies the heterosexual man’s dual love of cars and thick slabs of rippling muscle.

And let’s not forget that Johnny Driver is still an essential badass; some of the scenes where he and Nick Fury face off, still unable to establish trust, remind me of nothing less than two male civet cats trapped in an elevator, snarling wildly and coating the walls in thick sprays of musk and globs of faeces.

In fact the entire cast deserve applause for what must have been a gruelling series of scenes where they had to both pretend to drive cars and also have some kind of rudimentary emotion based off whatever event was occurring. But as per usual, the real stars of the show who totally stole the limelight were the cars themselves. Fat-F 6 has a beautiful array of fancy vehicles: seven inch Chevy Chases, sparkling Fassbenders, and all the chrome streeps and muggles a mechaphile could ask for. It is wonderful when their tail pipes spew flame, which signifies that their cars are going much faster, in the manner of other fast things like planes and cheetahs.

This movie was such a roaring montage of light and sounds that I couldn’t help but enjoy myself. To both my dates’ chagrin, and mine, I found that my pupils had dilated almost entirely, a condition that took a few days to wear off, and also I’d drooled a sizeable puddle into the crotch of my own pants. If that’s not a strong recommendation, I don’t know what is! Fast and the Furious Six takes the corner at an insane speed and leaves a giant skid-mark into your soul.

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Patrick Lenton is a writer of theatre and fiction. He blogs at The Spontaneity Review and tweets inanity @patricklenton.