The Fast and the Furious 5, 6 and 8 (a review)

These movies also appeared on Netflix over the past couple of weeks, so we sat and watched them over a period of a week or so. I think I’ve seen the first one but I honestly don’t know. It may have been Gone in 60 Seconds or a Riddick movie.


No pictures I could find on Google could ever do justice to the silliness of this franchise.



The reason I’m reviewing three of them at once isn’t just because I only saw these three, pretty much separated from all context. It’s also because there really doesn’t seem to be much separating them. And because there’s not enough material to do three separate reviews. And because I only saw these three, pretty much separated from all context.


Speaking of “pretty much separated from all context,” this picture accurately summarises all three movies. Possibly all eight.

Cool action heroes do heisty-feisty action stuff in cars, with steadily escalating levels of impossibility (interesting movie fact: The levels actually start at impossible), and The Rock says lines that no other actor in Hollywood could ever say with a straight face.


Also he does action scenes like these with every sign of doing a difficult job that simply has to be done, when in fact he really should win an Oscar for not collapsing into giggles of pure girlish delight the moment he reads the screenplay and then not being able to recover because his tummy and cheeks hurt from laughing.

They were hilarious – escalatingly so – and utterly nonsensical in their contrivance and overblown wastefulness. A lot of poor people could have been given a lot of medicine for the money that got poured into these eight movies, and the world would definitely have been a better place for it. But oh well, the movies happened instead so we might as well laugh at them.

And at the Hobbs and Shaw spin-off coming soon!

So yeah, there were cool cars and girls’ butts and The Rock’s muscles and The Rock’s muscles’ muscles, and a lot of explosions and crazy world domination plots and at some point it stopped being about car racing but they did still also car race for some reason sometimes, just because.


They also had a car chase with a submarine, also just because.

And as I said before, this is how I’m doing film reviews and criticism these days and Pitch Meetings Ryan pretty much nailed it for Fast and the Furious 8, which in turn basically does it for all the others as well. “Cars and butts and music, it’s like a Pit Bull video exploded.”

These were silly and dumb and utterly mindless entertainment, and I laughed aloud pretty much throughout. Just to drown out my brain which kept trying to switch itself back on and overrule everything I was seeing. Stupid brain.

Also Helen Mirren was in one of them.


I occasionally got sad thinking about the movies they could have made instead, and also all the poor people who still needed medicine, but I got better.

I’ll give this entire movie series an I am Groot out of a possible We are Groot.


3 Responses to The Fast and the Furious 5, 6 and 8 (a review)

  1. JonathanBloom says:

    I started watching part 8 the other night, and about fifteen minutes into it I realized that I had seen it before, but my brain had tried to protect me by forgetting it entirely. That whole opening scene where Diesel becomes a Cuban folkhero was just… too much.

    • stchucky says:

      Yeah, I just can’t get past the knowledge that his cousin really didn’t learn anything about fiscal responsiblity from that whole thing.

      It’d be like me borrowing money off a Russian mafia guy, then my brother-in-law beats him in a sharp shooting contest and I end up with a really cool Russian gun. Like, what did I learn from this? Also, Ivan still wants paying, right?

      • JonathanBloom says:

        What kills me is that the guy shows up at the end as a full blown Diesel fanboy, as if getting his butt kicked in a race is enough to teach him some lesson that makes him beholden to this American for life.

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