These Fast & Furious chapters are a bit like the Ferrero Rocher ads in that, as Ben Elton put it, the proverbial piss has already been taken out of them in their very production. In other words they are sufficiently detached from reality to owe the viewer only the barest nods to real world verisimilitude. You start thinking ‘No, that wouldn’t...’ and then almost inevitably pull up short.
The original films found their audience by pitching a group of B-list actors from varied ethnic backgrounds as a sort of on-screen action family. Eventually they were joined by two men who had genuine, lasting A-list status in the form of the Rock and the Stathe, so spinning them off this way makes considerable commercial sense.
The first half (roughly the running time of any normal film) is highly enjoyable, but after that it turns into a series of endings that aren’t. Though the best line in the film does come fairly late on, when Hobbs’s Samoan mother says to him ‘you’re all skin and bones’.
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